“Violent and Not Quite Modern?”: Lascars and Everyday Resistance Across the Sail–Steam Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Naina Manjrekar
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Subaltern Agency ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
Board Ship ◽  
Single Focus

By exploring forms of maritime resistance spanning the age of sail and steam, this article interrogates certain preponderant assumptions within the historiography of subaltern agency. Within this historiography, “modernity” has generally come to be signalled by trade union organisation and a concomitant regard for legality, while violent resistance is implicitly or explicitly taken to signify the Other of modernity: traditional, primitive, incomplete. Arguing that this tradition/modernity divide has mapped onto the sail–steam divide in the historiography of maritime resistance, this article complicates the association of violent mutiny with the age of sail and litigiousness with the age of steam. It does this by bringing both epochs into single focus, thereby finding important continuities in forms of everyday resistance on board ship across the sail-steam divide. Using existing scholarship to look at resistance in the age of sail and archival material like ships’ logbooks, newspapers and “Lascari”–English dictionaries for the age of the steam, it argues that rather than trade unions fundamentally reshaping the forms of everyday resistance into legal channels, it was in fact these longer traditions of quotidian contestation that fed into the formation of unions at the end of World War I, and continued through the 1920s and 1930s.

W.F.T.U. and Decolonisation: A Tunisian Case Study

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willard A. Beling
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Federation ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
The World

The World Federation of Trade Unions (W.F.T.U.) was one of the most hopeful ventures of all the Communist front organisations. Unlike some of the other fronts the Russians did not create it. They captured the W.F.T.U. after it was established, and had a good start. Once captured, however, the W.F.T.U. represented merely an extension of the pattern of the earlier Red International which had been created by the Comintern following World War I as a vehicle to reach the working masses of the world and rally them to Moscow. But like its predecessor—dissolved in 1937—the W.F.T.U. has also failed to make significant inroads among the workers in western countries and win control over them. While it has affiliates in the west, the French Confédération Générale du Travail (C.G.T.) and the Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (C.G.I.L.) being the most outstanding examples, the W.F.T.U. does not at all dominate these movements. Rather, control for the most part is exercised through the local Communist parties, some of which, while still very much an integral part of an international apparatus, have won some measure of autonomy from Moscow.1

Salvaging Status: Doubling Down in Russia, Egypt, and Great Britain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Renshon
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
World War ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
Suez Crisis

This chapter examines whether status concerns lead decision makers to value status more highly by looking at three separate sets of decisions: Russia's decision to aggressively back Serbia in the 1914 July Crisis, Britain's decision to collude with Israel and France in launching the 1956 Suez Crisis, and Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1962 decision to intervene in the Yemen Civil War (and continue to escalate through the rest of the decade). These cases broadly substantiate the patterns found in the Weltpolitik case—decision makers tend to value status more highly due to status concerns—while highlighting the plausibility of several new mechanisms. They also show that status concerns are not confined to European countries, great powers or states in the pre-World War I era. Finally, they reveal the other side of status concerns: state behavior designed to salvage or defend status rather than increase it.

From Africa to Antarctica

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-87
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Age Appropriate ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores how the BSA globalized the masculine myth of the frontier to combat the rise of a largely peer-regulated, frivolous, and sexualized youth culture in the 1920s. As the propagated “return to normalcy” after World War I had not led to a reinstatement of prewar gender norms but was contradicted by working and voting women as well as men struggling to find proper peacetime masculinities, Scout leaders rediscovered the foreign as a field to discipline youth and mold men. They arranged two spectacular expeditions, one to Africa and the other to Antarctica, which sent four Eagle Scouts abroad in the hope that their age-appropriate and consumer-friendly enactments of a young frontier masculinity would stabilize dominant hierarchies of age and gender. While the official narratives of these expeditions offered reassurance to white elites, the boys’ appropriations of manhood and empire were often idiosyncratic and inconclusive, pointing to the incongruities between adult projection and youthful experience.

Misfitting in America: Paul Leni, Conrad Veidt, and The Man Who Laughs

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Gábor Gergely
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Peripheral Position

“Misfitting in America” offers an analysis of The Man Who Laughs that suggests the film’s importance in four key areas: (1) as a transitional piece between silent cinema and the talkies, (2) as the last instalment of the Universal super productions, (3) as a thematic precursor to Universal’s famous horror cycle, and (4) as one of the most complete Hollywood attempts to adopt and co-opt German filmmaking practices and personnel. Moreover, this chapter focuses on the star of The Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt, as representative of an exilic body. Analysing Veidt’s physicality, performance, makeup, and costuming as Gwynplaine, this contribution looks at the corporeal inscription of the character’s permanent disfiguration, which underpins Gwynplaine’s understanding of himself and his peripheral position in society. With its intrinsic linking of disfigurement and dislocation in an endless cycle where one leads seamlessly into the other, the film becomes a way to understand how Hollywood studios situated their European émigré stars in the years following World War I.

Reclaiming the Past, Building a Future: Māori Identity in the Plays of Hone Kouka

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World War I ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.

Lewis Milestone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harlow Robinson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
American Film ◽  
World War ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Academy Awards ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Production History ◽  
Hollywood Blacklist ◽  
The Many

This book tells the remarkable personal and professional story of Lewis Milestone (1895-1980), one of the most prolific, creative and respected film directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Among his many films are the classics All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men, A Walk in the Sun, Pork Chop Hill, the original Ocean’s Eleven and Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando. Born in Ukraine, he came to America as a teenager and learned about film in the U.S. Army in World War I. By the early 1920s he was editing silent films in Hollywood, and soon graduated to shooting his own features. His films were nominated for 28 different Academy Awards during a career that lasted 40 years. Among the many stars whom he directed were Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, Joan Crawford and Kirk Douglas. Providing biographical information, production history and critical analysis, this first major scholarly study of Milestone places his films in a political, cultural and cinematic context. Also discussed in depth, using newly available archival material, is Milestone’s experience during the Hollywood Blacklist period, when he was one of the first prominent Hollywood figures to fall under suspicion for his alleged Communist sympathies. Drawing on his personal papers at the AMPAS library, my book gives Milestone the honored place herichly deserves in the American film canon.

scholarly journals The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International Labour Organization

2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiner Tosstorff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
International Labour Organization ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Union Movement

Accounts of the founding of the International Labour Organization (ILO) usually emphasize the role of social-reformist intellectuals and politicians. Despite the indisputable role of these actors, however, the international labour movement was the actual initiator of this process. Over the course of World War I, the international labour movement proposed a comprehensive programme of protection for the working classes, which, conceived as compensation for its support of the war, was supposed to become an international agreement after the war. In 1919, politicians took up this programme in order to give social stability to the postwar order. However, the way in which the programme was instituted disappointed the high expectations of trade unions regarding the fulfilment of their demands. Instead, politicians offered them an institution that could be used, at best, to realize trade-union demands. Despite open disappointment and sharp critique, however, the revived International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) very quickly adapted itself to this mechanism. The IFTU now increasingly oriented its international activities around the lobby work of the ILO.

Forster in Alexandria: Gender and Genre in Narrating Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Hawwa ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hala Halim
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
World War ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractLong associated with a cosmopolitanism that this article demonstrates was equally colonial, Alexandria's space also attests to variously gendered Orientalist constructions, as feminized and/or homoerotic. The article analyzes two texts that resulted from E. M. Forster's World War I Alexandrian sojourn—Alexandria: A History and a Guide, and a contribution to a Labour pamphlet, Notes on Egypt—to argue that whereas the former articulates a Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, the latter speaks up against British colonialism. Drawing on archival material relating to Mohammed El-Adl, the Egyptian tram conductor with whom Forster shared a homoerotic relationship, read as metonymic of subalternity, these paradoxes are explored in terms of gender and genre. The relationship between the guidebook genre and colonialism is pushed further in Forster's Alexandria where the subjectivity is a decidedly male imperial one. Simultaneously, El-Adl's dehumanization by the British informs Forster's condemnation in Notes on Egypt of the colonial conditions that underwrote an elite, Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

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