scholarly journals Rereading Empire, Rethinking History: Rehabilitation of the Vietcong in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-94
Author(s):  
Yuan Shu

Throughits reading of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, credited as the first Vietnamese American novel, this article seeksto investigate the discourse of reconciliation or refugee settlement in the context of the changing US master narratives from Empire to Cold War 2.0. Itarguesthat Cao’s novel in its effort to register a South Vietnamese perspective reorients modern Vietnamese experiences in relation to the US sense of democracy and freedom and in the process challenges what Donald Pease calls the state fantasy of American exceptionalism in the US military intervention in Vietnam. What Cao’s novel achieves is to blur the boundary between nationalism and communism in its representation of the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its early stage and to humanize and rehabilitate the Vietcong soldier as a possibly assimilable “us” rather than as simply “them” in the realm of the other.

Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari

This chapter examines Americanist composers William Schuman and Howard Hanson in parallel, as they engaged with the Cold War in very similar ways. These two men are shown to have used their influence as conservatory directors and advisers to government to present musical Americanism as a tool to grow American power on the global stage. Working with the State Department and the US Information Agency, Schuman and Hanson helped shape Cold War–created international cultural programs that placed a heavy emphasis on concert music and mandated the performance of American compositions. The chapter also includes an analysis of a musical work by Schuman that was commissioned by a branch of the US government. Credendum (1955) demonstrates in sound Schuman’s conception of Cold War American exceptionalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-81
Author(s):  
Christian Villanueva

Conflicts such as Nagorno-Karabakh, the Donbas, Libya, Syria and Yemen have shown that even in such different scenarios, the diffusion of the key advances that were at the heart of the Revolution in Military Affairs is a fact. Moreover, most of these advances are so well established that they are now in daily use not only by many states, but also by their proxies and even by transnational terrorist and criminal groups. This phenomenon is intimately associated with the erosion of US military superiority, a country that is seeing how the People's Republic of China or the Russian Federation, but also North Korea or Iran, are capable of challenging the former superpower. In this scenario, aware of the need to compensate for the advances made by the other players, the US has launched a series of initiatives, such as the Third Offset Strategy, aimed at achieving new technological and arms developments that could lead to a new Revolution in Military Affairs or, perhaps, a full-fledged Military Revolution. In this complex context, in which conflicts fought with inherited means will converge with new weapons, systems and platforms and with the entry into service of developments that we cannot yet imagine, the Spanish defence industry will have to struggle to survive, knowing that its main customer - the Spanish Ministry of Defence - is in a very delicate situation in terms of facing this new stage.


2018 ◽  
pp. 226-262
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman

This chapter focuses on religio-political violence, whose widespread incidence—after Pakistan's realignment in the US-led War on Terror in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent rise of a new, Pakistani Taliban—has threatened the very fabric of state and society. It examines the violence in question from two broad and intertwined perspectives, one relating to the state, and the other to Islam and those speaking in its terms. Part of the concern in this chapter is to contribute to an understanding of how the governing elite and the military have often fostered the conditions in which the resort to religiously inflected violence has been justified. It also suggests that the nonstate actors—ideologues and militants—have had an agency of their own, which is not reducible to the machinations of the state. Their resort to relevant facets of the Islamic tradition also needs to be taken seriously in order to properly understand their view of the world and such appeal as they have had in particular circles.


2021 ◽  
pp. 297-343
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo

Chapter 8 explores what happened to the US military’s black-white lines as American troops moved overseas. On the one hand, the US military transplanted these lines all around the world. While not identical to those on the home front, they also took multiple forms, involving everything from jobs and dances to courts-martial and minstrel performances. They also stemmed from the military’s paradoxical goals of winning a war for democracy while at the same time protecting white supremacy. On the other hand, fully achieving this latter goal became more difficult overseas because of locals’ warm relations with black Americans, the black-white comradeship of some American GIs, and the activism of black troops. Taken together, these developments chipped away at the black-white divide. At war’s end, Jim Crow in uniform was far from dead, but it lay moderately wounded just the same.


2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-58
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Yang

IS the State Immunity Act 1978 the sole basis for deciding on State immunity? It is and it is not. This seemingly self-contradictory reply is due to the fact that, on the one hand, any proceedings directly or indirectly against a foreign State must be brought under the 1978 Act while, on the other, certain provisions of that Act might paradoxically render the Act itself inapplicable and therefore entail recourse to rules outside the Act for settling the issue of State immunity. This is amply illustrated by the decision of the House of Lords in Holland v. Lampen-Wolfe [2000] 1 W.L.R. 1573, which involved a claim for defamation brought by a US university professor teaching international relations at a US military base in England as part of an education programme provided by her university under a commercial agreement with the US Government. The claim was brought against the education services officer at the base, who had written a memorandum listing serious complaints about the plaintiff’s performance and questioning her professional competence. The US Government claimed immunity on the defendant’s behalf.


Author(s):  
Patrick Cullen

The United States' diplomatic security apparatus that operates today from Washington DC to Iraq and Afghanistan is uniquely massive. It is incomparable in its size, budget, degree of institutionalization, and level of sophistication when set against both other nations as well as its own humble origins in WWI. To understand why this is so, the first half of this chapter historically maps and causally explains how, and why, US diplomatic security has been transformed over the course of its modern hundred-year history. The second half provides an empirically rich study of the various roles and functions of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the US military units that protect the US diplomatic mission.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1022-1022
Author(s):  
B Ivins ◽  
J Arrieux ◽  
W Cole ◽  
K Schwab

Abstract Objective The Automated Neurological Assessment Metrics (Version 4) Traumatic Brain Injury Military (ANAM4 TBI-MIL) battery is widely used by the US military to assess cognitive function. We compare intra-individual agreement between ANAM4 TBI-MIL and a battery of traditional neuropsychological tests using rates of low scores. Methods Complete and valid data from 246 healthy soldiers and 177 soldiers ≤7 days from sustaining mild TBI (mTBI) were used in this analysis. All soldiers were consecutively administered ANAM4 TBI-MIL and a traditional test battery consisting of: TOPF, WAIS-IV, CVLT-II, RCFT, DKEFS, and CPT-II. We performed base rate analyses of both batteries to determine the proportions of soldiers who had various numbers of scores that were 1.0+, 1.5+, and 2.0+ standard deviations below the normative mean. We used those rates to place Soldiers into a “low score hierarchy” ranging from the least poor (i.e. ~≥10th %ile) to the worst overall performance (i.e. ~≤10th %ile). We then compared agreement between the batteries at each of those levels. Results More soldiers with mTBI had low scores than healthy soldiers on both batteries. Of the soldiers who performed at the worst level on one battery, 88.1% from ANAM and 100% from traditional had some level of poor performance on the other battery. However, of the soldiers who performed at the worst level on either battery, only 58.3% from ANAM and 50.0% from traditional also performed at the worst level on the other battery. Conclusion These batteries similarly identify poor performance to a degree, though with some potentially meaningful differences still present.


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