The Body of Extraterritoriality

2019 ◽  
pp. 238-267
Author(s):  
Victor Fan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Second World

This book’s conclusion revisits what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining, and defending Hong Kong cinema, television, and media. The end of the previous chapter suggests that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed and it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. This conclusion therefore proposes that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not re-territorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. It argues that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

“In the Name of Humanity”: Nazi Doctors and Human Experiments in German Concentration Camps

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-252
Author(s):  
Daan de Leeuw
Keyword(s):  
Hippocratic Oath ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Human Experimentation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
Medical Experiments ◽  
Human Experiments ◽  
Nazi Doctors ◽  
Second World

Abstract During the Second World War over two hundred and fifty German doctors conducted medical experiments on human beings. Jurists and scholars have pondered ever since how doctors educated to heal could harm and even kill. Robert Jay Lifton has argued that psychological “doubling” could explain their crimes: their Faustian bargain with Nazism outweighed their Hippocratic Oath. Here the author argues, however, that Lifton’s theory does not apply to these Nazi doctors because there is no indication that they recognized ethical constraints against human experimentation. To explain how “healers became killers,” the author focuses on the broader historical aspects of their behavior.

Between Rosas and Sarmiento: Notes on Nationalism in Peronist Thought

1983 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-332
Author(s):  
Colin M. Winston
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Instant Replay ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Second World

Despite its crucial importance to the development of twentieth century Argentina and the volumes of scholarly, journalistic and partisan exegesis the movement has generated, historians have yet to reach a minimal consensus on the nature of Peronism. In the quarter century since Perón's first fall from power, numerous efforts have been made to explain, glorify or denigrate his regime. Many anti-Peronists have dismissed their bête noire as an unprincipled demagogue, motivated solely by political opportunism and an insatiable desire to retain power. Some supporters of the regime echo its propaganda by picturing Perón as taking the first great strides toward a politically free, economically independent and socially just Argentina. Certain anti-Peronists and a number of foreign commentators grudgingly admit that the movement had political and ideological content, but then label it as an imported fascist interlude, an alien virus that infected the body politic of Argentina just as it neared the end of the long march towards liberal democracy. The London Economist recently described the advent of Peronism as an instant replay of Italian Fascism. “The bulk of his supporters were the lower middle class immigrants who poured into the country from impoverished Italy after the second world war… The new arrivals cheered El Lider as they had cheered Il Duce for two decades. Perón representated the same historical phenomenon as Hitler and Mussolini…”

‘The sweet tang of rape’: Torture, survival and masculinity in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Second World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.

scholarly journals Norwid w poezji współczesnej. Formy obecności

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 Specjalny ◽  
pp. 189-215
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kudyba
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Poetry ◽  
The Body ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Second World

The article attempts to establish the character of references to Norwid in texts by poets representative of Polish modernity, accounting for functions of intertextual allusions, initially in the area of collective consciousness. As it turns out, during the interwar period and the Second World War works by the Romantic master were referenced at all stages of developing a distinct literary identity. Poets would not just read Norwid’s texts, but in fact regard themselves in the mirror of his works. However, after 1956 Norwid’s presence in literary life was rooted in the needs of literary scholars rather than in actual intertextual references. This tendency also manifests in studies of works by individual authors. It does happen – especially when we speak of implicit traces of Norwid in contemporary poetry – that the plane of relations between authors is not addressed by interpreters. Sometimes, dialogue as a research category disappears from their view, while the body of Norwid’s works is treated merely as a context, becoming a kind of mirror meant to display more fully a certain theme or characteristic of somebody’s writing. However, the most important forms of Norwid’s functioning in contemporary times are ones that facilitate meetings(successfulor not), as demonstrated by the fascination with Norwid’s poetry recognizable in texts by authors such as Mieczysław Jastrun, Julian Przyboś and Tadeusz Różewicz.

scholarly journals The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

scholarly journals The Currency of Historicity in Hong Kong: Deconstructing Nostalgia through Soy Milk

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Asian Tigers ◽  
Tv Commercials ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World ◽  
General Criticism

In the 1980s, as the end of the millennium approached, the production of nostalgia exploded all around the world. For Hong Kong, nostalgia became a reminder of the golden age that had transformed the city into one of the “Four Asian Tigers” in the decades following the end of the Second World War. While yearning for the better days of the past, Hong Kong coincidentally experienced destabilisation. As the rest of the world, especially the “baby boomers,” mourned the end of a productive era, Hong Kong locals were disturbed by the affirmation of the handover to China in 1997. In the context of these events, a creative rush to nostalgia in cultural manufacturing swept across the city. In the hope of highlighting the uniqueness of nostalgic production in Hong Kong, this study analyses two sets of TV commercials produced by local beverage company Vitasoy. Through the deconstruction of selected historical events, Vitasoy successfully reinvented its brand and, in contrast to general criticism of the concept, generated a positive connotation for nostalgia on the path towards Hong Kong's search for an identity.

Non-Alignment: Its Continued Relevance

1986 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-449
Author(s):  
Rama Rao
Keyword(s):  
Economic Condition ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Precise Shape ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
The Common ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The concept of non-alignment, as it is understood by the vast majority of people who wish to live in peace with their neighbours and the world at large, originated in India in the pre-Independence era. Indian national leaders had visualised that the Second World War would end Western colonialism in Asia and Africa and that India would regain its independence after two centuries of alien domination and exploitation. They had rightly judged that the Second World War, despite its ideological overtones of democracies versus dictatorships, was essentially a war initiated by one group of powers to regain, and of the other to retain their colonies. Whatever the precise shape of the post-War world, Indian national leaders were clear in their minds that their most important tasks on regaining independence would be to improve the economic condition of the mass of our people, secure social justice, and provide for minimum public health and educational needs. That after four decades of prodigious effort and expense, we seem to be standing still like the proverbial toiler trying to ascend a treadmill, is a different issue. The fact remains that Indian leaders, aware of the paramount and urgent need for improving the lot of the common man, wanted to be left alone to attend to their problems. They wanted no part in Great Power rivalries. They also saw the need, in the larger interests of all and especially of the poor and newly liberated countries, for the latter to recognise the virtues of non-alignment as well as its practical utility in a world torn by strife. The argument that the larger the body of non-aligned countries, the larger the area of peace and to that extent, the less the arena of conflict is irrefutable. Basically the concept of non-alignment is sound. It was very relevant when the idea first took shape in India and remains equally relevant and valid today.

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