‘What is that… is that a man in there… or something?’

The Thing ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Jez Conolly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Part Plant

This chapter discusses how the Thing in human form is ultimately the greatest instigator of fear. Simply not knowing who is who, but knowing what happens when a Thing is hidden inside a man contributes to the film's suspenseful, horrific effectiveness. The chapter gives a brief history of plant-based monsters on the big screen and how the The Thing might be part-plant. It discusses how the word 'man' on the tagline of The Thing may actually refer to 'mankind' which suggests a rapid and complete subsuming of all human life on Earth should the organism be allowed to reach civilization. The chapter relates the characters and how they are constructed to the political atmosphere at the time the movie was released citing the Cold War and the rising fear of Communism in the United States. It also discusses the gender politics that play out in the film.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

Histoire du mot «démocratie» au Canada et au Québec. Analyse politique des stratégies rhétoriques

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Le Canada

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

The Invisible Hand of Diplomacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-376
Author(s):  
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time ◽  
Simple Narrative ◽  
The U.S

In December 1977, a tiny group of U.S. glove makers—most of whom were African American and Latina women—launched a petition before the U.S. International Trade Commission calling for protection from rising imports. Their target was China. Represented by the Work Glove Manufacturers Association, their petition called for quotas on a particular kind of glove entering the United States from China: cotton work gloves. This was a watershed moment. For the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, U.S. workers singled out Chinese goods in pursuit of import relief. Because they were such a small group taking on a country as large as China, their supporters championed the cause as one of David versus Goliath. Yet the case has been forgotten, partly because the glove workers lost. Here I uncover their story, bringing the history of 1970s deindustrialization in the United States into conversation with U.S.-China rapprochement, one of the most significant political transformations of the Cold War. The case, and indeed the loss itself, reveals the tensions between the interests of U.S. workers, corporations, and diplomats. Yet the case does not provide a simple narrative of U.S. workers’ interests being suppressed by diplomats and policymakers nurturing globalized trade ties. Instead, it also underscored the conflicting interests within the U.S. labor movement at a time when manufacturing companies were moving their production jobs to East Asia.

Response to James Lebovic's review of Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1169-1170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jervis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bright Side ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War

Among the many issues raised by James Lebovic's perceptive review are two that strike me as crucial: the relationships between intelligence and social science and those between intelligence and policymaking. The first itself has two parts, one being how scholars can study intelligence. Both access and methods are difficult. For years, diplomatic historians referred to intelligence as the “hidden dimension” of their subject. Now it is much more open, and Great Britain, generally more secretive than the United States, has just issued the authorized history of MI5 (see Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2009). Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has released extensive, if incomplete, records, and the bright side (for us) of intelligence failures is that they lead to the release of treasure troves of documents, which can often be supplemented by memoirs and interviews. But even more than in other aspects of foreign policy analysis, we are stuck with evidence that is fragmentary. In this way, we resemble scholars of ancient societies, who forever lament the loss of most of the material they want to study.

Chilean Copper and U.S. Companies

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Democratic Government ◽  
Chilean Copper ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter focuses on the role of copper policies in the relations between the United States and Chile during the Frei administration, especially as they relate to the developmental efforts of the Christian Democratic project. During the Frei administration, the political debate on copper policies reached a climax. Since U.S. capitals were among the most significant actors in the story, the discussions around the issue of copper converged with the ideological visions of the United States and the Cold War held by the different Chilean political parties. As the Frei administration tried to introduce the most comprehensive and consistent reform around the structure of the property of the Gran Minería del Cobre, the forces in competition in the arena of Chilean politics stood by their ideological convictions, regarding both copper and the United States, in their opposition or grudging support for the policies proposed by the Christian Democratic government. Moreover, the U.S. government became deeply involved in the matter of copper in Chile, first by pressuring the Chilean government into rolling back a price increase in 1965 and then, mostly through the personal efforts of Ambassador Edward Korry, by mediating in the negotiation between the Frei administration and Anaconda on the nationalization of the U.S. company's largest mine, Chuquicamata, in 1969.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Mass

The introduction considers the place of the spoken word in Russian history, presenting a pre-history of rhetoric and oratory in Russia before the 1860s. Examples are drawn from sermons, literature, theatre, and the universities, as well as from the political practice of Russia’s rulers. The introduction goes on to explain the significance of public speaking in Russia’s ‘stenographic age’, highlighting the challenges of modern mass politics and communications. It further offers comparisons between Russian political culture and the political culture of Britain, Germany, and the United States, paying particular attention to the place of oratory in the political imagination. It concludes by outlining the structure and rationale of the book.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945–8 Conjuncture

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell ◽  
Ian Roxborough
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The importance of the years of political and social upheaval immediately following the end of the Second World War and coinciding with the beginnings of the Cold War, that is to say, the period from 1944 or 1945 to 1948 or 1949, for the history of Europe (East and West), the Near and Middle East, Asia (Japan, China, South and East Asia), even Africa (certainly South Africa) in the second half of the twentieth century has long been generally recognised. In recent years historians of the United States, which had not, of course, been a theatre of war and which alone among the major belligerents emerged from the Second World War stronger and more prosperous, have begun to focus attention on the political, social and ideological conflict there in the postwar period – and the long term significance for the United States of the basis on which it was resolved. In contrast, except for Argentina, where Perón's rise to power has always attracted the interest of historians, the immediate postwar years in Latin America, which had been relatively untouched by, and had played a relatively minor role in, the Second World War, remain to a large extent neglected. It is our view that these years constituted a critical conjuncture in the political and social history of Latin America just as they did for much of the rest of the world. In a forthcoming collection of case studies, which we are currently editing, the main features of the immediate postwar period in Latin America, and especially the role played by labour and the Left, will be explored in some detail, country by country.1In this article, somewhat speculative and intentionally polemical, we present the broad outlines of our thesis.

Before Bandung: Afro-Asian Cross-referencing and Comparative Racialization

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 599-622
Author(s):  
Tanya Agathocleous ◽  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Comparative Racialization

Abstract This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century.

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