The Queer Afterlife of Gossip

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-412
Author(s):  
Chad Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Queer Art ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Ouija Board

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.

5. Soviet–American Relations: Avoiding Hot War and the Search for Stability

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-158
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines US–Soviet relations during the Cold War as well as the question of the genuineness of efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve disarmament and resolve troublesome disputes. It begins with a discussion of the German question, noting that Germany’s future position was vital to the future of Europe and a particular concern of the Soviets. It then considers the progress of arms control and peace efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union, before concluding with an analysis of the relationship of arms control to the use of armaments in hot war and to some aspects of fighting the Cold War.

From the Cold War to the Clash of Civilizations

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-155
Author(s):  
Joan Wallach Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter argues that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the old public/private distinction was dissolved in the realms of both religion and sexuality. This put into place concepts that prepared a new discourse of secularism in Western Europe and the Anglo-American world—one in which Islam took the place of Soviet communism as a threat to social order. Secularism as a political discourse was eclipsed by the Cold War, although its traces and effects were not. The relationship of the state to religion was reformulated as the Soviet Union came to represent, not the embodiment of secularism as it had been defined in the nineteenth-century anticlerical campaigns but the home of what was derided as godless atheism. In this new discourse, the secular and the Christian were increasingly considered synonymous, and women's sexual emancipation became the primary indicator of gender equality.

Engineering Science Education and the Indian Institutes of Technology

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Dhruv Raina
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Engineering Science ◽  
Technological Education ◽  
Institutes Of Technology ◽  
Education In India ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
War Discourse

The last two decades have witnessed a revival of research interest in the Cold War, and on science during the Cold War, from a revised social theoretic perspective.1 Part of this reframing is evident in explorations of the relationship underpinning the Cold War discourse and modernisation theory. Drawing on this new turn, this article switches the register to the first decades of decolonisation, and revisits the establishment of elite institutes of engineering and engineering science, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, in order to understand the consequences of the entanglement of the Cold War discourse with decolonisation on higher technological education in India in the 1950s. The article argues that within the realm of technological or engineering science education, across the Cold War divide, the globalisation of higher technological education or the ‘Americanization of higher education’ as Krige calls it, is evident, as much at the elite IITs in India as elsewhere.

5. Soviet–American Relations: Avoiding Hot War and the Search for Stability

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines US–Soviet relations during the Cold War as well as the question of the genuineness of efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve disarmament and resolve troublesome disputes. It begins with a discussion of the German question, noting that Germany’s future position was vital to the future of Europe and a particular concern of the Soviets. It then considers the progress of arms control and peace efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union before concluding with an analysis of the relationship of arms control to the use of armaments in hot war and to some aspects of fighting the Cold War.

Not Quite “Brothers in Arms”: East Germany and People’s Poland between Mutual Dependency and Mutual Distrust, 1975–1990

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Boysen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Military Cooperation ◽  
Historical Legacy ◽  
Mutual Dependency ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter assesses the relationship between East Germany and Poland during the last phase of the Cold War. It explains how the historical legacy of German–Polish relations infused the relationship of both countries with mistrust, despite the officially proclaimed brotherhood of a “socialist community” mandated from Moscow. Personal enmity between communist leaders Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka, conceptual differences of notions of statehood, and rivaling foreign policy goals and ideas about tolerance for domestic opposition since the end of the 1970s only exacerbated these tensions, which not even successful military cooperation under the Warsaw Pact umbrella was able to alleviate. Held together by their relationship to the Soviet hegemon, the officially required “trust” between the two countries fully disintegrated in the second half of the 1980s.

Russia – USA relationship: R.I.P. Cold War?

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Isabela de Andrade Gama
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Self ◽  
International Level ◽  
The West ◽  
Nato Enlargement ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Situation

The focus of the proposal is related to the relationship of Russia and the West after the Cold War, especially concerning the NATO enlargement. It is assumed that at this moment the relationship of these entities have changed to a whole new situation. However if the Cold War was about performance of identity conformation, this proposal claims that this logic still persists In this scenario Russia is trying to find a new role at the international level, as much as NATO is trying to do the same. since their main enemy no longer exists, so the Atlantic Alliance starts a new project of spreading democracy and market economy to the ex-soviet sphere of influence, on the basis of fear of a renewed cycle of Russian nationalist expansionism. Thereby, the rationalism of this debate can be substituted by a new one more inclined to the post-structuralist debate. In this way the main purpose of this paper is to analyze the delimitation of the Russian and West’s identities in this space full of “otherness” constituting the “self”, in this scenario of tension/distension hark back to the Cold War era, with special emphasis on Russian foreign policy.

New ''Cold War''

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-34
Author(s):  
Vladimir Batiuk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Nuclear Arms

In this article, the ''Cold War'' is understood as a situation where the relationship between the leading States is determined by ideological confrontation and, at the same time, the presence of nuclear weapons precludes the development of this confrontation into a large-scale armed conflict. Such a situation has developed in the years 1945–1989, during the first Cold War. We see that something similar is repeated in our time-with all the new nuances in the ideological struggle and in the nuclear arms race.

The Grid, the Spectacle and the Labyrinth in The Big Clocks Skyscraper: Queered Space and Cold War Discourse

Film Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Merrill Schleier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Style ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
War Film

The Big Clocks skyscraper is a mechanical, entrapping grid controlled by a huge timepiece. It is presided over by the homosexual Janoth who tries to frame Stroud for a murder that he committed. This article traces Stroud‘s journey within the International Style skyscrapers temporarily ‘queered spaces.’ The Cold War film seeks the removal of undesirable ‘aliens’ to liberate capitalist space and reassert hegemonic heterosexuality. The married Stroud outsmarts his adversaries, leading to Janoth‘s death by his own building. After Janoth is symbolically ‘outed,’ he kills his partner before plummeting down a hellish elevator shaft, punishment for his ‘perverse’ deeds.

POLITICS AND THE CASE OF POETRY: ARENDT ON BRECHT

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 503-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATCHEN MARKELL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
War Discourse

Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht has often been understood as an indictment of Brecht's postwar accommodation with the Stalinist regime in East Germany, in line with Arendt's supposed commitment to a firm separation between poetry and politics. Offering the first full reconstruction of the transnational history of Arendt's writing on Brecht, this article shows instead that Arendt's essay was a defense of Brecht against the polemics it is often taken to exemplify. Joining poetry to politics by holding both at a distance from philosophy, Arendt assigned poetry the vocation of disruptive faithfulness to factual reality, which allowed her to praise Brecht on political grounds and to leverage forbearance for his political “sins.” Indeed, by narrating Brecht's “sins” and “punishment” against the grain of Cold War discourse about the poet, Arendt's essay emulated aspects of the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's writing.

Wartime paradigms and the future of western military power

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-418
Author(s):  
Olivier Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Force Structure ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Technological Improvements ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract From the perception of the imminence of threats at the political level to the seizing of initiative through proper timing at the tactical level, temporality is directly related to war and warfare. Yet, despite some analyses of the importance of time at the political/grand strategic level (usually by scholars) and at the tactical level (usually by military professionals) there is surprisingly little discussion of the impact of time on the preparation and the conduct of warfare. This article introduces the concept of ‘wartime paradigm’ as a heuristic device to understand the relationship between the perception of time and the conduct of warfare, and argues that after the Cold War, a specific ‘wartime paradigm’ combining an optimization for speed and an understanding of war as risk management has guided western warfare, from force structure to the conduct of actual operations. It shows how the changing character of warfare directly challenges this wartime paradigm and why, if western forces want to prevail in future conflicts, the establishment of a new wartime paradigm guiding technological improvements and operational concepts is critical.

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