scholarly journals A Critique of American Supremacist Politics in Cold War in Sorayya Khan's City of Spies

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (II) ◽  
pp. 9-16
Author(s):  
Irfan Farid ◽  
Asma Aftab ◽  
Zubair Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
American Intervention ◽  
The World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Insight Into

The present study investigates the representation of America in Anglophone Pakistani Literature with a special focus on Sorayya Khan's City of Spies with the assumption to trace some possible connection between American intervention and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the context of Pakistan's politics. Given the American intervention in Pakistani politics and its indelible impact on the domestic and international scenario had made the country a virtual battleground for the superpowers of the world. Khan's novel situates this conflict in the aftermath of the military coup of General Zia, followed by the Afghan war and (c)overt American alliance in it, which brought about serious implications for the Pakistani state. The story of the novel offers some pertinent extracts which deal, literally or metaphorically, with the role and representation of America in these geostrategic events. The article has used the critical cultural angle by investing the theoretical views of Ziauddin Sardar in terms of the Muslim world's apathy for America in the aftermath of cold war politics are used to get a better insight into the central problem by underscoring how this foreign policy of America has been responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan.

Hegemonic Disarray—American Internationalisms and World Disorder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Deudney
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Order ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
At Home

The end of the Cold War left the USA as uncontested hegemon and shaper of the globalization and international order. Yet the international order has been unintentionally but repeatedly shaken by American interventionism and affronts to both allies and rivals. This is particularly the case in the Middle East as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the nuclear negotiations with Iran show. Therefore, the once unquestioned authority and power of the USA have been challenged at home as well as abroad. By bringing disorder rather than order to the world, US behavior in these conflicts has also caused domestic exhaustion and division. This, in turn, has led to a more restrained and as of late isolationist foreign policy from the USA, leaving the role as shaper of the international order increasingly to others.

Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity's Rainbow

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HAMILL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

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.

The Economic Performance of Military Regimes: A Cross-National Aggregate Study

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. D. McKinlay ◽  
A. S. Cohan
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Economic Performance ◽  
Military Regime ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Cross National

The military regime has now become a common phenomenon throughout the world. Research on the military in low-income systems used to focus on the military coup rather than on the military regime, but in recent years this imbalance has lessened. Moreover, many of the old ‘standard findings’ about military regimes have come to be rejected. It is fitting that they should have been since they tended to be the products more of stereotyping and inadequate theorizing than of systematic research.

scholarly journals Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. RLS66-RLS87
Author(s):  
Doris Mironescu ◽  
Andreea Mironescu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Socialism ◽  
East West

This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid (2015). The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism. This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world. Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies.

scholarly journals Psychic Trauma of Youngsters in R.K. Narayan’s The World of Nagaraj

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-51
Author(s):  
Gabriel Karthick K
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Deep Insight ◽  
Psychic Trauma ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Insight Into

The article examines the psychic trauma of youngsters during the crucial stage of their life. It gives a deep insight into the practical issues faced by youngsters, as explained by R.K. Narayan in his novel. It describes the complex transition of an adolescent mind into adulthood. The themes of the novel The World of Nagaraj are closely attached to real-life experiences of youngsters and also engross the psychology of young minds. The main objective is to analyze the common psychic issues of youngsters in the Indian context.

scholarly journals Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: Unveiling the Trauma of Adolescent Boys Trapped in Afghanistan’s Culturally Legitimised Paedophilia-‘Bacha Bazi’

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pallavi Thakur ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Adolescent Boys ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
Adult Men ◽  
The World ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Instrumental Role

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a powerful narrative on ‘Bacha Bazi’, “same-sex pedophilia restricted to adult men and adolescent boys” (Powell, 2018, p.1), prevalent in Afghanistan. When marginalisation of Afghan women became the nucleus of major studies , especially during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Hosseini unveiled in The Kite Runner, the gruesome Afghan culture of ‘Bacha Bazi’ that disintegrates a boy’s social and sexual identity. ‘Bacha Bazi’ is not consensual rather coercion hence is equivalent to rape and reflects the grotesque violation of Afghan male children’s human rights. While the world viewed Afghanistan as a land of incessant wars, tribal conflicts, violence and female exploitation, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner provided a startling insight into ‘Bacha Bazi’ and its implications on Afghan boys. The novel reveals the socio-culture domain of Afghanistan and ethnic rivalry playing an instrumental role in the existence of Bacha Bazi. In the light of the above discussions, the present paper examines the deleterious effects of Bacha Bazi on Afghan male children. It elucidates the psychological trauma of adolescent Afghan boys that evolves out of the sexual abuse and new androgynous identity imposed on them.

Middlemarch

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
David Russell
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Insight Into

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.’ The greatest ‘state of the nation’ novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community and individualism. Eliot follows the fortunes of the town's central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psychologically rich portraits, the novel contains some of the great characters of literature, including the idealistic but naïve Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and egotistical Rosamund Vincy, the dry scholar Edward Casaubon, the wise and grounded Mary Garth, and the brilliant but proud Dr Lydgate. In its whole view of a society, the novel offers enduring insight into the pains and pleasures of life with others, and explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life:. art, religion, science, politics, self, society, and, above all, human relationships. This edition uses the definitive Clarendon text.

The foreign policy options of a small unrecognised state: the case of Abkhazia

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Thomas Frear
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Universal Principle ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
The World ◽  
Systemic Understanding

The study of international relations has historically focused on the activities of large, powerful states, dismissing the smaller entities of the international system as unimportant or merely objects of policy for the larger entities. This truism extends especially to those entities that exist in an unrecognised or partially recognised limbo, neither a full part of the international system nor an ungoverned space. Yet in the post-Cold War world, following the dissolution of large multi-national states such as the USSR, these entities have begun to proliferate. This proliferation provides a significant challenge to an international system in which the primary participants are states, and to the institutions created to oversee their interaction. Unrecognised entities, existing outside of this framework, represent a threat to the universal principle of sovereignty, that one true institutionalised aspect of international relations. As such the study of these entities and their interaction with the world outside their borders is a study important for a systemic understanding of contemporary international relations. This article aims to address the foreign policy of one such entity, Abkhazia.

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