Zen-Boom “Culture Wars”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Arthur Koestler ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Value History

Chapter Five traces a postwar history of Zen as it emerged as a compelling and useful matrix for a Cold War era spiritual, social, political, and artistic conditions. Our present-day “Zenny Zeitgeist,” as I call it, developed in large measure from this period. But careful examination of the postwar Zen boom—in its varied manifestations, including serious Zen teaching and practice, Beat Zen and various countercultural Zen creative movements—reveals that Zen was by no means singular (if it ever was), solely related to religion, strictly serious, and exclusive to Japan or East Asia. Moreover, Zen and Zen inspired art became the focus of debate and even venomous attack. Public intellectuals and Zen teachers including D. T. Suzuki, Hu Shih, Philip Kapleau, Arthur Koestler, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki wrestled with each others representations of Zen and sought to resolve questions of authenticity and value, history and practice.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New Order ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.

The End of Apocalypticism: from Burton Mack’s Jesus to North American Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
James Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article takes a different look at the work of Burton Mack on apocalypticism and the post-historical Jesus crystallisation of the Christian ‘myth of innocence’ in terms of the social history of scholarship. After a critical assessment of previous receptions of Mack’s work from the era of the ‘Jesus wars’, there is a discussion of Mack’s place in broader cross-disciplinary tendencies in the study of apocalypticism with reference to the influence of liberal and Marxist approaches generally and those of Norman Cohn and Eric Hobsbawm specifically. Mack’s approach to apocalypticism should be seen as a thoroughgoing updating of Cold War liberal constructions of apocalypticism for an era of American ‘culture wars’, from Reagan to Trump. Part of this updating has also meant that, while much of his work against the apocalyptic Christian myth of innocence has been explicitly aimed at the de-legitimising the Right, it also continues the old Cold War intellectual battles by implicitly de-legitimising anything deemed excessively Marxist.

Europe and the Arab-Israel Conflict: A Survey

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Paul-Marie de La Gorce
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
European Community ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

With France in the lead, the European Community in 1996 seemed on the verge of cautiously asserting a more independent role in the Middle East peace process. This is in marked contrast to Europe's passive role for more than a decade following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and especially since the Gulf War, a period during which France and other major European powers acquiesced in U.S. domination of Arab-Israeli peace issues. Reviewing the history of European initiatives and absences during the cold war era, the author examines whether Europe now has the determination to chart its own peace policy despite U.S. and Israeli antagonism to its involvement.

scholarly journals Adelante! Military Imaginaries, the Cold War, and Southern Africa's Liberation Armies

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-650
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Alexander ◽  
Joann McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Military Training ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractStudies of southern Africa's liberation movements have turned attention to the great importance of their transnational lives, but have rarely focused on the effects of the military training Cold War-era allies provided in sites across the globe. This is a significant omission in the history of these movements: training turns civilians into soldiers and creates armies with not only military but also social and political effects, as scholarship on conventional militaries has long emphasized. Liberation movement armies were however different in that they were not subordinated to a single state, instead receiving training under the flexible rubric of international solidarity in a host of foreign sites and in interaction with a great variety of military traditions. The training provided in this context produced multiple “military imaginaries” within liberation movement armies, at once creating deep tensions and enabling innovation. The article is based on oral histories of Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) veterans trained by Cuban and Soviet instructors in Angola in the late 1970s. These soldiers emerged from the Angolan camps with a military imaginary they summed up in the Cuban exhortation “Adelante!” (Forward!). Forty years later, they stressed how different their training had made them from other ZIPRA cadres, in terms of their military strategy, mastery of advanced Soviet weaponry, and aggressive disposition, as well as their “revolutionary” performance of politics and masculinity in modes of address, salute, and drill. Such military imaginaries powerfully shaped the southern African battlefield. They offer novel insight into the distinctive institutions, identities, and memories forged through Cold War-era military exchanges.

Punk Crisis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond A. Patton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This book tells the story of punk rock as a global movement that spanned the boundaries of the Cold War world, focusing on examples in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and their connections with the Third World. Drawing on archival documents, ’zines, mainstream publications, and other sources, it closely examines the appeal of punk to its practitioners and the reactions of each society to the rise of punk. It argues that punk grew out of and contributed to the global transition from the late Cold War era to the era of neoliberal/neoconservative globalization. Punk arose among individuals and scenes communicating across the Iron Curtain at a moment characterized by transnational crisis, globalization, postmodernism, and an aesthetic/cultural turn in sociopolitics. Through the culture wars it helped provoke in the First World and Second World alike, punk contributed to a global realignment from the sociopolitically, ideologically oriented world of the Cold War to the subsequent era, oriented primarily around culture and identity. Through the example of punk, it challenges the resistance-centric framework of Cold War era cultural studies, presenting an alternative model for how culture is intertwined with politics that accounts for its significance as a major sociopolitical force.

scholarly journals Performing Refugee’s Body and Memory: Poetics of Diaspora in lê thi diem thúy’s Autoperformance

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Io Chun KONG ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Refugee Studies ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Critical Refugee Studies

Despite the fact that substantial scholarship in Asian diasporic and refugee narratives has been developed in the post-Cold War era, critical refugee studies related to autoperformance have yet to be examined. Within this context of addressing autoperformance as an aesthetic genre, this paper explores the poetics of Vietnamese refugeehood as mediated in lê thi diem thúy’s ?Red Fiery Summer (1995) and the bodies between us (1996). While the former historicizes the Vietnam War from the diasporic perspective of a refugee, the latter articulates the counter master narratives by performing bodily memories of refugeehood. Informed by Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory”, the paper demonstrates how body and memory could be inextricably and interdependently rendered as a poetics of diaspora in performance. This paper further argues that autoperforming these two aspects is critical to revisiting the history of the Vietnam War and calling the militarism of the U.S.A. into question.

7. Post-Cold War era

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Global Security ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Terrorism ◽  
Regional Conflict ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

What significant lessons can be learned from the history of nuclear weapons? ‘Post-Cold War era’ considers post-Cold War attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The clarity of the Cold War world has given way to the ambiguities and uncertainties of a world where global security is threatened by regime collapse, nuclear terrorism, new nuclear weapons states, regional conflict, and pre-existing nuclear arsenals. The nuclear rivalry with Russia, North Korea, and Iran gives the feeling of returning to the Cold War period, with the ever present threat of a deliberate or unintended confrontation. So far, we have avoided mutual destruction, but is this down to policy or luck?

The Future of Futurism

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the history of futurism and the appeal and difficulty of predicting the future. It considers the difference between the Cold War-era futurism of making predictions and the more contemporary style of shaping and building the future piece by piece.

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