scholarly journals Religion, race, and the nation inLa Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, 1942–1943

Modern Italy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Virtue
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Military Culture ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
New Man ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Ideal

This paper examines intersections and divergences between Catholic universalism and Fascist ethno-nationalism in the pages ofLa Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, a satirical weekly newspaper for Italian military personnel in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Military propagandists appealed to grassroots Catholicism to motivate demoralised Italian soldiers in the last year of war against the communist-led Yugoslav partisan movement. Their use of Catholic themes revealed overlapping values but also apparent incongruities between Christianity, Fascism, and Italian military culture that had been evident throughout theventennio. While Catholic anti-communism blended relatively seamlessly with nationalist-Fascist anti-Slavism to depict the partisan enemy as a dehumanised Other, the use of conventional piety and Christian humanitarianism in the army’s propaganda contradicted Fascist and military concepts of the ideal Italian ‘new man’. In the process, military propagandists sowed the seeds for thebrava gentemyth that dominated postwar memory and national identity in Italy.

Race, citizenship and national identity in The School Paper, 1946-1968

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sianan Healy
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
World War ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Ideal

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years. Findings – State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment. Originality/value – This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.

scholarly journals Britishness and otherness: Representing and constructing identity in BBC’s Land Girls

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Bonnie White
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

This article situates Land Girls (BBC, 2009–2011) in dialogue with the Second World War and its legacy. Although the series ostensibly deals with the experience of British Land Girls during the war in a melodramatic way, Land Girls is best understood as an anxious commentary on the place of Britain and its cultural institutions following the war. The series uses national, racial and economic others in order to de-romanticise notions of a collective national identity, while simultaneously using those others to help articulate an idealised sense of Britishness for a 21st-century audience.

Soldiers, Sailors, B-Girls, and Out-of-Bounders

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-86
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
Color Line ◽  
World War ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
North Beach ◽  
Second World ◽  
Sexual Experimentation

As the Second World War led to massive migrations, port cities swelled with workers and military personnel. Newly arrived residents sought leisure and social connections, and entertainment districts, such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Fillmore, and North Beach, expanded as well. Freed from the watchful eyes of hometown family and neighbors, many saw bars and nightclubs as sites of social and sexual experimentation. Military and municipal authorities, concerned to maintain both the racial color line and sexual discipline, began to monitor San Francisco’s intersectional nightspots. But nightspot owners and their patrons also pushed back, resulting in the formation of both formal and informal socially conscious networks and institutions that used entertainment districts as places of connection, protection, and liberation.

“Don’t Mess Around with Gordie”: Hockey Violence, the 1959 Gordie Howe-Lou Fontinato Fight, and Postwar Masculinity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy L. Lorenz ◽  
Braeden McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
World War ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Ideal

This article explores cultural constructions of hockey, violence, and masculinity through a close examination of one of the game’s most successful and prominent players in the postwar period, Gordie Howe. By combining skill and scoring ability with toughness, physicality, and a willingness to fight when necessary, Howe epitomized many qualities of the ideal hockey player over the course of his lengthy professional career, which extended from 1946 to 1980. In particular, this study focuses on media coverage of Howe’s highly publicized fight against Lou Fontinato of the New York Rangers on February 1, 1959. Using Canadian and American newspapers and magazines as the primary research base, we analyze media representations of Gordie Howe in the context of ideals and anxieties related to North American masculinity following the Second World War. Historians have identified this period as a time when Canadian and American manhood was perceived to be in decline. We argue that Howe demonstrated a combination of controlled violence and humble manliness suggested by his early nickname in the Detroit press, the“Bashful Basher.” Howe’s rational and expert application of violence – especially in contrast to the emotional Fontinato – firmly established his masculine credentials within the culture of hockey, while positioning him more widely as a “modern” yet rugged role model for masculine renewal in postwar Canada. Howe’s example of gentlemanly masculinity normalized and celebrated a culture of fighting in hockey while establishing a standard of conduct for superstar players that persists to the present day. At the same time, cultural constructions of Howe’s manhood contributed to the entrenchment of a dominant version of heroic, white, heteronormative hockey masculinity in Canadian life.

The Wider Subjectivities of Men in Reserved Occupations in Wartime Glasgow and Clydeside

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chand
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
National Level ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Everyday Living

This chapter analyses the narratives of men who worked in reserved occupations in Clydeside to explore wider aspects of their individual subjectivities other than gender. Areas of subjectivity examined include national identity (picking up from the discussion in Chapter 3 and looking at men of non-British or Scottish nationality), class consciousness and political identity, religion and social activities. This chapter widens the picture of how men in reserved occupations experienced the war, arguing that male reserved workers were aware of ‘imagined’ collective subjectivity on a national level, and that important similarities existed between the subjectivities of men who worked in different regions of Britain, particularly those with higher proportions of men working in reserved occupations. The chapter re-enforces the notion that the subjectivities of such men existed on different levels and reflected to varying degrees the concepts of ‘imagination’ and ‘living’, making clear that the subjectivities of male civilian workers in wartime Clydeside comprised different national, ethnic, religious, class and political attributes, all integral and important to reserved men before, during and after the Second World War. Arguably, however, men were often aware of these integral aspects of their subjectivities on an ‘imagined’ level, and many aspects of them were superseded by a pre-occupation with everyday living, also continuous and fundamentally unchanged by wartime. In arguing for the continuity of different ‘imagined’ and ‘lived’ forms of subjectivity among men in reserved occupations in wartime Clydeside, this chapter re-enforces the notion that, although integral to masculinity, temporary wartime ideals did not fundamentally change the masculine subjectivities of male civilian workers.

Meglio di ieri

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Anne Bruch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Educational Films ◽  
Second World

This article examines a series of educational films and documentaries produced between 1948 and 1968 that document the activities of the Italian state. These films, which record the dedicated and arduous work of the Italian government and administration, had two functions. First, they informed students and the general public about the democratic structures, institutions and aims of the new republic, promoting a fresh and convincing vision of national identity. Second, they served to obscure and rewrite the collective national memory of Fascism and Italian involvement in the Second World War. These films thus reveal the fine line between public information, political propaganda, and civic education.

‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

scholarly journals Literature of Bushidō: Loyalty, Honorable Death, and the Evolution of the Samurai Ideal

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coldren
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
High Water ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
High Water Mark ◽  
Warrior Class ◽  
Second World

This essay will address the evolution of the samurai warrior code (bushido), concentrating on its depiction in several prominent works of Japanese literature from 1185 to 1989. This essay will argue that rather than a concrete set of principles, bushido was actually a malleable set of romanticized qualities supposedly possessed by the samurai that were repeatedly adapted to a changing Japanese society in order to maintain a national identity predicated on the warrior class. Beginning with the introduction of the samurai through the Tale of the Heike, this essay will then proceed to discuss the blatant romanticization of the samurai until the early 1900’s as illustrated in such prominent works and mediums as the house codes of various feudal lords, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, and Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido. The militarism of the Pre-World War II period will then be analyzed along with Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi while the culture of death affiliated with the Second World War will be examined as the high-water mark for romanticized bushido as a means of national identity. This essay will then conclude with an analysis of Mishima Yukio’s Patriotism, the definitive end to the Japanese people’s overt identification with samurai and their idealized code by 1989.

2. Annihilation and dislocation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antulio J. Echevarria
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Physical Capacity ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
Economic Costs ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
High Reward ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Ideal

Annihilation and dislocation represent the “ideal outcome” in military strategy: a swift victory with as few casualties and economic costs as possible. Annihilation seeks to reduce an adversary’s physical capacity to fight, usually in a single battle or “lightning” campaign, such as Hannibal’s victory against the Romans in Cannae (216 BCE). Dislocation endeavors to reduce an opponent’s willingness to fight by causing confusion or disorientation through unexpected maneuvers or the use of surprise, such as Hitler’s blitzkrieg conquests in the Second World War. Annihilation and dislocation strategies can be considered high risk, high reward. They both require military forces trained well enough, and led effectively enough, to execute complex maneuvers.

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