Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Re-enacting the international order, or: why the Syrian state did not disappear

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Janis Grzybowski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
International Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
New States ◽  
Regime Support ◽  
Rare Opportunity ◽  
State Form

Abstract At the height of the Syrian civil war, many observers argued that the Syrian state was collapsing, fragmenting, or dissolving. Yet, it never actually vanished. Revisiting the rising challenges to the Syrian state since 2011 – from internal collapse through external fragmentation to its looming dissolution by the ‘Islamic State’ – provides a rare opportunity to investigate the re-enactment of both statehood and international order in crisis. Indeed, what distinguishes the challenges posed to Syria, and Iraq, from others in the region and beyond is that their potential dissolution was regarded as a threat not merely to a – despised – dictatorial regime, or a particular state, but to the state-based international order itself. Regimes fall and states ‘collapse’ internally or are replaced by new states, but the international order is fundamentally questioned only where the territorially delineated state form is contested by an alternative. The article argues that the Syrian state survived not simply due to its legal sovereignty or foreign regime support, but also because states that backed the rebellion, fearing the vanishing of the Syrian nation-state in a transnational jihadist ‘caliphate’, came to prefer its persistence under Assad. The re-enactment of states and of the international order are thus ultimately linked.

Women, Power, and the State in Guinea

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Dessertine
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
French Colonial

Women’s involvement in the processes of state formation is marked by a strong ambivalence in Guinea: female political mobilizations appear as an indispensable advantage for state power when they are deployed in support of it, but these mobilizations can likewise disrupt and generate major problems for the state when they are directed against it. The efficacy of female political involvement is closely linked to the historiography of relationships between women and the state in Guinea, a country that helped construct an image of female activism outside of areas considered to be exclusively political, and as a guarantor of social justice. During the colonial period, as was the case for many other countries under French colonial rule, the influence of women was restricted to the domestic sphere: once households ceased to constitute a political resource for the colonial regimes (in contrast to the precolonial era), the influence that women were able to wield within, for example, matrimonial alliances was considerably reduced. Yet, women played a highly important role in nationalist conflicts and under the regime of Sékou Touré, who served as Guinea’s first president from 1958 to 1984. Presented as the “women’s man,” Touré sought high integration of women into his political party, based on structures inspired by the Soviet socialist model. This was a Guinean political originality. In this context, even though women were given official prominence, their demands nonetheless drew on conservative models that relied on a politicization of the maternal figure. Yet the domestic and apolitical character of female mobilization still lends it a spontaneous efficacy in a context in which laws supporting women are seldom enforced and in which the situation seems to have become increasingly precarious for women due to male emigration and inequalities in property rights.

Versions of Immobility: The Contemporary American Writer and the Jewish Tradition

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 78-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Urban Problems

The “Jewishness” of recent American fiction has already been well explored. But discussion of the work of Jewish writers tends to be retrospective: it leads back to the shtetl and the shlemiel without considering how “Americanised” Jewish forms and themes have become. Clearly, recent authors such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are indebted to a fund of “Jewish experience”. But their novels are “American”, far more concerned with twentieth-century urban problems than with the enclosed life of the traditional Jewish community. This essay therefore attempts to assess how far “Jewish” localised material has been translated into specifically “American” terms.

The Anguish of Angola: On Becoming Independent in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century

1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
John A. Marcum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Black Africa

As the United States approaches its two-hundredth year of independence, Angola is entering upon its first. Fifteen years after most of Black Africa shed colonial rule, and fourteen after Angolan insurgents shattered the myth of multiracial harmony in Iusophone Africa, a total collapse of Portuguese authority has catapulted Angola to an uncertain nationhood born in chaos and civil war.

The sovereignty surplus

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-428
Author(s):  
Neil Walker
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Face ◽  
State Form

Abstract This Foreword article aims to rescue the sovereignty concept from the conflicted center of irresoluble debates about the resilience and value of the state form. The idea of a “sovereignty surplus” shifts the focus of inquiry towards sovereignty as a deep frame of legal and political thought and action. It evokes how sovereigntist thinking, in tandem with the techniques of modern constitutionalism, spills over beyond its threshold modern achievement of imagining and securing the paramount authority of the state system. The sovereignty surplus manifests itself in part as a “surfeit” of sovereignty—an overabundance of new sovereignty claims emerging in new sub-state and supra-state contexts—but it also captures sovereignty’s augmented reworking in existing contexts. The sovereignty frame, then, while resilient in its general form and settled in its statist locus, is capable of and susceptible to adjustment and redeployment in the face of new internal and external pressures. It harbors an excess that allows its component elements to be fleshed out, modified, and diversified so as both to absorb and reshape shifting sources and assertions of political authority. These movements are captured by examining the contemporary interaction amongst the five “R”s: the recomposition, raising, rationing, reinforcement, and reduction of sovereignty.

Peasants, Prophets, and the Power of a Millenarian Vision in Twentieth-Century Brazil

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 488-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd A. Diacon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
The State ◽  
Rio Grande Do Sul ◽  
Santa Catarina ◽  
Railroad Workers ◽  
Railway Company ◽  
The North

Flood lights illuminated the southern Brazilian night as thousands of railroad workers struggled to meet their daily trace construction quotas. Brazil Railway Company foremen shouted their orders so as to be heard above the din of massive steam-powered earth movers. These machines, a novelty for the region in 1910, were the North American-owned company's newest ally in its push to meet the rapidly approaching construction deadline. On December 17, 1910, a gayly decorated train crossed the Santa Catarina-Rio Grande do Sul border, thereby inaugurating Brazil's newest railroad line. The company had succeeded in connecting the agricultural south with Brazil's rising industrial star, the state of São Paulo.

Utopia and Political Theology in the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
S. D. Chrostowska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Future Return ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
State Form ◽  
Systematic Program

This chapter focuses on a figure of historical progression embedded in revolutionary thought in the modern era: the spiral. Most associated with Hegelianism, the spiral stands for the dialectic of history: an eventual future return to the origin. The spiral’s secularized telic schema remains, however, continuous with the theological model of change as the circle of perfection. This continuity is reflected in Romantic messianism and its heirs. My discussion of the spiral is anchored well before their time, in “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” likely authored in 1796/1797 by Hegel himself. Unpublished until the twentieth century, the text calls for a new, rational mythology to do away with the modern state. In contrast to the later Hegel’s attempt to identify the spiral of history with the development of the state-form, the political theology of this radical early document identifies its utopian telos with the overcoming of the state.

The Vietnamese Élite of French Cochinchina, 1943

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Viet Nam ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Subordinate Role

It is well-known that the French colonial theory of assimilation, even though it could never be carried out completely in practice, implied the development in French colonies of an indigenous élite of people prepared to accept both French culture and a (subordinate) role in the running of the colony. In French Cochinchina, this élite was especially important owing to the circumstances of the conquest, between 1860 and 1867, when most of the Vietnamese scholar-officials who had ruled the area previously, withdrew and refused to co-operate with the Europeans. The French had no choice but to create an élite of their own, and begin to educate it in French ways. The process has been discussed in detail in a recent study by Dr Milton E. Osborne, which takes the story of colonial rule in southern Viet-Nam down to about 1905.1 During the first four decades of the twentieth century, this élite continued to grow and develop, so that by the 1940s it had become the key element in Cochinchinese society so long as colonial rule might last. The purpose of the present article is to examine the composition and role of this elite about the end of the period in which France could take its presence in Indochina for granted.

The Anguish of Angola: On Becoming Independent in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century

1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
John A. Marcum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Black Africa

As the United States approaches its two-hundredth year of independence, Angola is entering upon its first. Fifteen years after most of Black Africa shed colonial rule, and fourteen after Angolan insurgents shattered the myth of multiracial harmony in Iusophone Africa, a total collapse of Portuguese authority has catapulted Angola to an uncertain nationhood born in chaos and civil war.

scholarly journals Ernest Hemingway e a Guerra Civil Espanhola

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Tom Burns
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Turn

Resumo: Este artigo discute o romance For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940 [Por quem os sinos dobram], do escritor e jornalista americano Ernest Hemingway, uma ficção sobre a Guerra Civil Espanhola que o autor escreveu na Espanha enquanto servia como correspondente de guerra. O romance, favorável à causa legalista, parece assumir uma posição mais política que os romances e histórias anteriores de Hemingway, mas, na verdade, desenvolve mais uma variação do típico “herói de Hemingway”, celebrado em quase toda a obra do autor: o indivíduo solitário, corajoso, destinado ao fracasso, mas determinado a extrair algum significado da vida em um mundo absurdo.Palavras-chave: Guerra Civil Espanhola; herói de Hemingway; literatura de guerra.Abstract: This article discusses the American writer-journalist Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his fiction of the Spanish Civil War, which the author wrote in Spain while serving as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. The novel, sympathetic to the Loyalist cause, seemed to take a more political turn than his previous novels and stories, but in fact turned out to work yet another variation of the typical “Hemingway hero” celebrated in nearly all of the author’s work – the isolated individual, courageous, doomed, but determined to elicit some meaning from life in an absurd world.Keywords: Spanish Civil War; Hemingway hero; Literature of War.

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