scholarly journals Biomedical knowledge in Mexico during the Cold War and its impact in pictorial representations of Homo sapiens and racial hierarchies

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Erica Torrens

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the state of Mexican genetics and biomedical knowledge during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as its impact on the visual representation of human groups and racial hierarchies, based on social studies of scientific imaging and visualization (SIV) and theoretical concepts and methods. It also addresses the genealogy and shifts of the concept of race and racialization of Mexican bodies, concluding with the novel visual culture that resulted from genetic knowledge merged with the racist phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century in Mexico.

Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Schwartz

AbstractIn the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110067
Author(s):  
Soenke Kunkel

Setting the stage for the special forum, this introduction points to the centrality of science diplomacy activities within many current foreign policy concepts around the world. It also points to the lack of historical perspective within many current academic debates about science diplomacy. Suggesting the value of such a perspective, the introduction then draws attention to a number of fruitful contributions that histories of science diplomacy may make to contemporary history. These include: a better understanding of how entanglements between science, foreign policy, and international relations evolved over the twentieth century; a refined understanding of the workings of foreign relations and diplomacy that sheds light on the role of science as an arena of foreign relations; new insights into the Cold War; a globalizing of perspectives in the writing of contemporary history; a new international focus on widely under-researched actors like universities, science movements, science organizations, and science academies; a focus on new themes that range from global environmental problems to issues like cultural heritage. The remainder of the introduction then delineates some of the shared assumptions and findings of the essays and then briefly introduces each contribution to the special section.


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.


Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Galera

In the uneasy context of the Francoist regime, some authors tried to alleviate the difficult cultural situation through creation and translation. This is the case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener, commonly known as Tísner, a Catalan writer who was exiled to Mexico for more than twenty years. Translation from Spanish into Catalan played a major role in Tísner’s efforts to keep Catalan culture alive, and this article presents the major translation initiatives in this language combination throughout the twentieth century in order to provide enough context to give Artís-Gener’s endeavours their real weight. In Mexico, he wrote his most famous novel, Paraules d’Opoton el Vell (‘Words of Opoton the elder’), which describes the imagined ‘discovery’ of Europe by the Aztecs and creates a bond between the fate of the Nahuatl and the Catalan people under the yoke of Spanish imperialism. In 1992 Artís-Gener decided that the novel had to be retranslated into Spanish and undertook that task himself. In addition, Tísner translated major Latin American authors from Spanish into Catalan, an experience that gave him the chance to regain control of the language imposed by the Francoist regime and use it as a form of relief from the political oppression.


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