Flannery O’Connor and the Fascist Business: Plurality and the Possibility of Community

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-161
Author(s):  
Alison Staudinger
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker

Recognizing O’Connor’s relevance as a political thinker, Political Scientist Alison Staudinger puts O’Connor in dialogue with Hannah Arendt in order to explore O’Connor’s approach to fascism, a pressing subject in the author’s Cold War context, as well as in our contemporary political moment. By engaging Arendt, Staudinger examines O’Connor’s relationship with fascism on three levels—as the practice of the artist, as the worldview of some fictional characters, and as an approach to her personal friendships. Staudinger argues that while O’Connor sees the temptations of fascism, she finally rejects it as a totalizing denial of human plurality. Staudinger suggests that O’Connor falls short of depicting an earthly community that could accept this plurality, especially regarding racial equality; at the same time she points out that O’Connor’s fiction demonstrates how it is the country’s deep-seated racial hierarchy that makes it vulnerable to fascism.

“Herself but Black”: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the “Near Enemy” of Civil Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Rachel Watson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Jim Crow South

Rachel Watson takes up O’Connor’s role as a political thinker and writer by examining issues of racial hierarchy in O’Connor’s fiction and putting her work in conversation with that of Richard Wright. Watson notes that although O’Connor invokes the “manners” of the Jim Crow South, she does not offer a sentimental or abject form of pity for her characters, regardless of their race. It is in this pity, so often connected with Cold War totalitarianism, that Watson finds a connection between the work of Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright. This chapter shows the commonality between two authors whose work had previously seemed disparate, as Watson highlights their mutual fear of a racial and economic hegemony. 

Behind the atomic curtain: School desegregation and territoriality in the early Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
James T. Sparrow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Security ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Red Flags ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations

The early Cold War was, infamously, a time of political retrenchment, when anticommunists exploited popular fears and national security pretexts to squelch the democratic energies of the Popular Front. Left-led unions and civil rights organizations alike purged their leadership of any communist affiliation, while professional anticommunists pushed other organizations on the Left to do the same or land on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Support for left-liberal causes such as anti-fascism, labor rights, gender equity, and racial equality' provided red flags for investigators and agitators on the prowl for evidence of internal subversion.1

Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture (review)

1994 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-375
Author(s):  
Thomas Schaub
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Cold War Culture

Death in Philadelphia, 1958

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-263
Author(s):  
Hannah Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Korean Student ◽  
Idealized Model

In 1958, In-Ho Oh, a foreign student from South Korea, was beaten to death in West Philadelphia by a group of black youths. The brutal murder shocked people all over the nation who wrote hundreds of letters to the newspapers and the mayor about the incident. Some letter writers focused on the implications of the murder for Cold War diplomacy, while some believed there were moral lessons to be learned from the generous actions of Oh’s family. Yet other letter writers focused on race and juvenile delinquency and constructed an idealized “model” minority in the Korean student, contrasting him to the young suspects. The death of In-Ho Oh came to have different meanings to different groups and challenged America’s self-perception about racial equality and exceptionalism.

Aleksandras Shtromas

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
Leonidas Donskis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
East European ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
Political Thinker

Aleksandras Shtromas (1931-1999), a British-American scholar, became an eminent figure in his native Lithuania, yet Westem social scientists have yet to discover this human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and political thinker. Shtromas had no doubts about the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union, resting his analysis on the assumption that communism was unable to provide any viable social and moral order. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia had become skilled at the ideological cat-and-mouse games, wrestling wth Soviet Newspeak and censorship, and employing an Aesopian language in order to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and lies. A gifted prophet of post-communism, Shtromas was the only political scientist in the world who took the disintegration of the Soviet Union as early as the late 1970s as an ongoing process. This essay links Shtromas' legacy to the great East European dissenters.

A Tale of Two Feminists?

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-131
Author(s):  
Yosefa Loshitzky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Red Army Faction ◽  
German Woman ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Red Army ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

One of the most engaging, yet controversial, public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt continues to be attacked with the same venom and ferocity that followed the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) more than fifty years ago. This article discusses why Arendt remains such a divisive figure and why her intellectual legacy is still so unsettling, particularly for Zionists. The essay examines how these issues are represented, negotiated, and problematized in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt (Germany/ Luxembourg/France, 2012). It explores how one of the most prominent contemporary feminist filmmakers, whose work celebrates the life and activism of revolutionary women from Rosa Luxemburg to Gudrun Ensslin from the Red Army Faction, transforms the “historical Arendt” into a “cinematic Arendt.” Although not a revolutionary in the tradition of Luxemburg, the German-Jewish political thinker Arendt is an interesting choice for a left-leaning, post-Holocaust German woman director. Yet Arendt presents a paradox for feminists due to the contradictions embedded in her works and public pronouncements. The article examines these contradictions and how Arendt emerges from this film, which attempts to portray a politically engaged intellectual woman, a figure that is almost entirely absent from the film screen.

scholarly journals Islam, Modernism and the West

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Many

The relations between Muslim peoples and the West, and between Muslimpeoples and forms of modernity, have become increasingly pressing issues ofscholarly and political concern over the past twenty-five years. In part, this isdue to the growing power of Islamism in the lives and politics of many Muslimsocieties and, in part, to the fact that some fonns of Islamism can appear to beprofoundly hostile to all that the West represents. The growing presence ofMuslim peoples in Western societies and the many assumptions which thatpresence calls into question has also caused scholars and politicians to focus onthese relations. Add to this the fact that some leading members of the Westernpolicy establishment, most notably the US political scientist S. P. Huntington, have come to talk in the post-cold war era of a “clash of civilizations” in whichthe clash between Islam and the West is the most profound and the most dangerousfor world p e .This book, which contains sixteen essays by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars,mainly from institutions in Europe and the Arab world, sets out to addresskey issues in the relations between Muslims, modernity, and the West. It is theoutcome of a symposium held in Toledo, Spain, in April 1996, which wasprompted by the Eleni Nakou Foundation for the promotion of cultural contactand understanding among European peoples, and held under the auspices of theJose Ortega y Gasset Foundation. &ma Martin Muiioz, professor of Sociologyof the Arab and Islamic World at the Autonoma University of Madrid was theintellectual “playmaker” of the occasion. Due to its Islamic past and the fundamentalrole it played in transmitting Islamic learning and culture for thedevelopment of Christian Europe, Spain was a goad choice of location for theaonference ...

scholarly journals «THE STRUGGLE IS CONTINUING TODAY, WITH ADDED RALLYING CALL: ‘KYIV AGAINST MOSCOW!’»: CONCEPTS OF UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS IN THE TIME OF COLD WAR

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-107
Author(s):  
Kateryna Kobchenko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Organizational Challenges ◽  
National Leader ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Political Realities

The author proposes the overview of the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism after WWII on example of one of the nationalistic organizations, revolutionary or Bandera’s OUN. It is done through the analysis of three program documents published during the period from 1948 till 1968 with every time 10-years distance (two of them of S. Bandera’s authorship), which shows the ways of thinking of its leaders and points of institutional development of this organization. Ukrainian integral nationalism was formed as an ideology and found its institutionalization in the interwar period and in the context of time marked with spreading of authoritarianism and the idea of a strong national leader. During WWII the OUN and the UPA became the main power of the Ukrainian national resistance to the occupational regimes. But in the new political realities after WWII and in the situation of emigration the Ukrainian exile parties incl. nationalists were faced with the new ideological as well as organizational challenges and had to search for the new methods and attitudes to the struggle for Ukraine’s liberation. The key point for the formation of new ideas and political program became the resolutions and declarations of the Fourth Grate Meeting of the Bandera’s OUN in 1968, the first so important party’s assamble in the after war time. The views and ideas of J. Stetsko played a significant role on it, he appeared to be not only a participant of an international anticommunist movement, but also a political thinker who managed to integrate the nationalistic ideology with the new political realities and with the context of international policy of that time. In the questions of anticolonial discourse and anticommunist critic his theses corresponded to the most important ideas of the Cold War period and allowed to actualize the nationalistic ideas on their new stage of development.

Part I Histories, Ch.12 Hannah Arendt and International Law

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitehall Deborah
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Important Site

This chapter reconsiders the arc of Hannah Arendt’s (1906–1975) writings about international law. Her scattered remarks present a careful pattern of demands upon international law, announced at the discipline’s key formative turns, for the resolution of the Jewish Question or rather, the series of issues problematizing Jewish-ness as uncertainty about citizenship, nation, and race from the eighteenth century onward. But international law was an important site for her attention even where law was adjuvant or ancillary to the broader sweep of her analytical project. Arendt repeatedly returned to international law expecting answers as a political thinker: for the working out of tensions within the idea of nation for the sake of humankind and the plural life of politics.

To Be an Apolitical Political Scientist: A Chinese Immigrant Scholar and (Geo)politicized American Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-155
Author(s):  
Qing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Cold War

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and producing knowledge about China for the United States during the Cold War. It analyzes how Tsou navigated a complex political terrain in which his Chinese identity was both a professional asset and a liability. Examining Tsou's personal and professional decisions as well as his response to the politicization of his Chinese identity reveals the (geo)politicization of higher education more broadly.

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