scholarly journals Five Kurosawas and a (de)construction of the Orient

Politics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-294
Author(s):  
Miia Huttunen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Intervention ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Concrete Form ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Realities

In 1959, UNESCO published a catalogue of Eastern films suitable for Western audiences, titled ‘Orient. A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture’. The aim of the catalogue was to familiarise Western audiences with Eastern cultures through cinema. The catalogue lists seven general characteristics of Eastern cinema to distinguish it from its Western counterpart and to provide ready-made interpretations of the essential characteristics of the Eastern world. Of the 139 feature films listed in the catalogue, five were directed by Kurosawa Akira – the biggest number of films by a single director. This article provides an analysis of the five Kurosawa films within the frame provided by the characterisations in the catalogue in the political framework of World War II and its aftermath. Reading the cultural differences listed in the catalogue as a means of constructing the East in Western eyes, the article suggests UNESCO’s world was defined neither in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitical polarisation of the Cold War nor the ongoing decolonisation process. Instead, the catalogue served the purpose of proposing a cultural intervention in geopolitics, providing a reimagining of political realities constructed on a cultural basis and given a concrete form through cinema.

The Symbolism of Subversion: Notes on Some Cold War Icons

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.

scholarly journals The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Lars-Otto Reiersen ◽  
Ramon Guardans ◽  
Leiv K. Sydnes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Scientific Collaboration ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractAfter World War II, the Cold War generated significant barriers between the East and the West, and this affected all sorts of cooperation, including research and scientific collaboration. However, as the political situation in the Soviet Union started to change in the 1980s under the leadership of Mikael Gorbachev, the environment for international collaboration in many areas gradually improved.

Poisoned Partnership: The International Mercury Cartel and Spanish–Italian Relations, 1945–1954

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
PABLO DEL HIERRO ◽  
ESPEN STORLI
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Cold War

This article investigates the development of the Spanish–Italian mercury cartel from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. Previous literature has singled out the cartel as one of the most robust international cartels of the twentieth century, but as this article shows, the cartel broke down toward the end of the 1940s, and although briefly reestablished in 1954, it quickly dissolved again. Building on access to original source material from archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, and United Kingdom, we investigate the underlying reasons why the cartel broke down, and how and why it was eventually reestablished. Because both the main Italian and the Spanish mercury producers were state-owned, this article pays special attention to the influence of the political relations between Spain and Italy on the development of the cartel. The study of the mercury cartel is used as a prism to investigate the point where industry strategies meet government strategies. This article thus contributes to two major strands of literature, both to the business history literature on international cartels in the post-1945 world and to the diplomatic history literature on the intricate relationship between Spain and Italy in the early phase of the Cold War.

Liturgical Development between Ecclesiastical Normativity and Societal Perception

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Florian Wegscheider
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Recent History ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The historical kiss of peace between Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Krzyżowa/Kreisau in 1989 serves as an example for how existential experiences can profoundly impact and even alter liturgy. However, liturgy can also be an obstacle for the further reflection and processing of such experiences, if they are not taken up in the liturgical setting. The political situation of a divided Europe as well as the Cold War following World War II indicate a unique situation in recent history that concernes believers all over the world. The question that results from taking this immediate past seriously is what kind of experiences liturgy can and should address (and in what form) and if there might be experiences or forms of handling such experiences that threaten the power of the ritual.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

Global Governance in a World of Change

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World War ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Governance Institutions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modes Of Governance

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.

scholarly journals Style and ideology: The cold war 'blend' in Greece

Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
Keti Romanu
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Western World ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
The Cold War

This paper describes cultural policy in Greece from the end of World War II up to the fall of the junta of colonels in 1974. The writer's object is to show how the Cold War favoured defeated Western countries, which participated effectively in the globalisation of American culture, as in the Western world de-nazification was transformed into a purge of communism. Using the careers of three composers active in communist resistance organizations as examples (Iannis Xenakis, Mikis Theodorakis and Alecos Xenos), the writer describes the repercussions of this phenomenon in Greek musical life and creativity.

scholarly journals EXPLORING AND EXPLAINING THE ECONOMIC POLITICAL RELATIONS BETWEEN IRAN AND THE SOVIET UNION IN THE SECOND PAHLAVI ERA EMPHASIZING THE SYSTEM THEORY

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimia Zare ◽  
Habibollah Saeeidinia
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International System ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

Iran and Russia have common interests, especially in political terms, because of the common borders and territorial neighborhood. This has led to a specific sensitivity to how the two countries are approaching each other. Despite the importance of the two countries' relations, it is observed that in the history of the relations between Iran and Russia, various issues and issues have always been hindered by the close relations between the two countries. The beginning of Iran-Soviet relations during the Second Pahlavi era was accompanied by issues such as World War II and subsequent events. The relations between the two countries were influenced by the factors and system variables of the international system, such as the Cold War, the US-Soviet rivalry, the Second World War and the entry of the Allies into Iran, the deconstruction of the relations between the two post-Cold War superpowers, and so on.The main question of the current research is that the political relations between Iran and Russia influenced by the second Pahlavi period?To answer this question, the hypothesis was that Iran's political economic relations were fluctuating in the second Pahlavi era and influenced by the changing system theory of the international system with the Soviet Union. The findings suggest that various variables such as the structure of the international system and international events, including World War II, the arrival of controversial forces in Iran, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, the US and Soviet policies, and the variables such as the issue of oil Azerbaijan's autonomy, Tudeh's actions in Iran, the issue of fisheries and borders. Also, the policies adopted by Iranian politicians, including negative balance policy, positive nationalism and independent national policy, have affected Iran-Soviet relations. In a general conclusion, from 1320 (1942) to 1357 (1979), the relationship between Iran and Russia has been an upward trend towards peaceful coexistence. But expansion of further relations in the economic, technical and cultural fields has been political rather than political.

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