War, Trauma, Displacement, Diaspora

Author(s):  
Tuire Valkeakari

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s and Caryl Phillips’s portraits of African American troops in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. These authors’ stories of African American soldiers and veterans bring together two topic areas that may, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other: war and diaspora. This chapter interrogates the complex relationship between diasporic subjectivity and national citizenship. Utilizing Caruthian trauma theory, it reveals how Morrison, in Sulaand Tar Baby, and Phillips, in Crossing the River, subtly link their narratives of temporary traumatic displacement on foreign battlefields with the historical ur-trauma of diasporic dislocation. In these novels, the wounds that the Middle Passage and slavery inflicted on black diasporic bodies and psyches metaphorically bleed into, and coalesce with, traumas and post-traumatic conditions resulting from black participation in modern warfare—participation that both Morrison and Phillips depict in terms of young black men being sent abroad to fight destructive and traumatizing wars that are not theirs to fight. The literal and metaphorical connections that Morrison and Phillips forge between war and diaspora in various ways call attention to the greed and large-scale violence that have all too often accompanied the Western project of modernity.

Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat

This chapter examines the efforts by black female nurses and white male nurses to claim a space for themselves in a profession that relegated them to the margins. It begins with a discussion of the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), along with an overview of healthcare and home-front racial politics during World War II. It then turns to nurse shortages during World War I and World War II and proceeds by analyzing the World War II integration campaign by African American female nurses within the larger context of the civil rights movement. In an effort to break down racial barriers, the chapter shows that African American nurses co-opted traditional gender conventions to make the claim that the sex of the nurse, not race, should determine nursing care for soldiers. It also explores how African Americans used wartime rhetoric about equality and democracy on behalf of their campaign for equal rights, justice, and opportunity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 278-300
Author(s):  
Miloš Živković ◽  

The paper discusses the literary shaping of war traumas in the novels “The House of Remembrance and Oblivion” by Filip David, “The Delusion of St. Sebastian” by Vladimir Tabašević and “The Dog and the Double Bass” by Saša Ilić. The manner in which the Holocaust influences the life of Albert Weiss and the lives of other characters, decades after World War II, and the mystical contemplation of the meaning of evil stand out as the most important themes of David’s novel. The interpretation of “The Delusion of St. Sebastian” proceeds via the protagonist Karl and his attitude to the language he learned during the war. The war induces dissociative identity disorder, the protagonist’s adoption and subsequent overcoming of the victim’s position. The analysis of Ilić’s work focuses on the protagonist of the novel “The Dog and the Double Bass”, Filip Isaković, and his post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as psychiatric and anti-psychiatric treatment methods.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110519
Author(s):  
AD (Sandy) Macleod

Prominent English neurologist Sir Charles Symonds, during World War II service with the Royal Air Force, published a series of articles emphasizing the role of fear initiating psychological breakdown in combat airmen (termed Lack of Moral Fibre). Having served in a medical capacity in the previous war, Symonds re-presented the phylogenetic conceptualizations formed by his colleagues addressing ‘shell shock’. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) re-classified Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), removing the diagnosis from the category of Anxiety Disorders. This was the view introduced a century ago by the trench doctors of World War I and affirmed by Symonds’ clinical experience and studies in World War II.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belal A. Muhammad

Although use of chemical weapons has low probability, it can cause a large scale casualties among exposed people if it is used. These kind of weapons have been used by human being since ancient history. However, the first large scale usage started with World War I followed by World War II. Several regulations and guidelines have been set by different organizations such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to limit the usage of these weapons. However, till the present time the world is not free from the risk of these weapons on human life.While the effects of chemical weapons on certain human systems including respiratory and immune systems as well as the dermatological complications have been extensively studied, the relation between chemical weapons and cancer development has not been fully understood. This review addresses the definition and usage of chemical weapons in addition to the types of chemical agents used in their production. Evidences about the chemical weapons and cancer development have also been thoroughly discussed. In summary, it appears that data regarding carcinogenicity of chemical weapons in human are both limited and contradictory. Accordingly, any claim about the carcinogenic effects of these kind of weapons in the exposed victims need to be properly validated.


2018 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Philip A. Mackowiak

Chapter 7 (“Military Medicine”) illustrates war’s long history of functioning as a pragmatic training ground for physicians, especially surgeons, was well as a giant field trial for developing, testing, and refining medical advances. The images included in this chapter transport the reader from the first aid stations of imperial Rome to the ligatures of Ambrose Paré, the “flying ambulances” Dominique Jean Larrey introduced during the Napoleonic Wars, Florence Nightingale’s implementation of the principles of proper sanitation in her hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War, the advent of reconstructive surgery in Germany just prior to the outbreak of World War I, the evolving concept of the post-traumatic stress disorder, and the war crimes committed by German and Japanese physicians during World War II.


1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Onno van der Hart ◽  
Paul Brown ◽  
Mariëtte Graafland

Objective: This study relates trauma-induced dissociative amnesia reported in World War I (WW I) studies of war trauma to contemporary findings of dissociative amnesia in victims of childhood sexual abuse. Method: Key diagnostic studies of post-traumatic amnesia in WW I combatants are surveyed. These cover phenomenology and the psychological dynamics of dissociation vis-à-vis repression. Results: Descriptive evidence is cited for war trauma-induced dissociative amnesia. Conclusion: Posttraumatic amnesia extends beyond the experience of sexual and combat trauma and is a protean symptom, which reflects responses to the gamut of traumatic events.


Author(s):  
Katayoun Shafiee

The building of the global oil industry in the Middle East served as the occasion for one of the largest political projects of technical and economic development in the modern world. Scholarship has long associated an abundance of natural resources such as oil with autocracy in the Middle East while overlooking the sociotechnical ways in which oil operations were built with political consequences for the shape of the state and the international oil corporations. The early period of oil development was marked by oil abundance up to World War I, when demand for oil started to increase rapidly with the invention of the internal combustion engine. The cheapest source of production was in the Middle East. From the perspective of the largest transnational oil corporations to emerge in this period, the energy system needed to be built in a way that demand and overabundance were managed. Oil industrialization enabled the production and large-scale consumption of this new and abundant source of energy but was also connected with striking oil workers and controlling or blocking processes of industrialization in rival sectors such as the coal and the chemicals industries. In the first three decades of the 20th century, the process was made possible through the building of an international oil economy that took the form of production quotas and consortium agreements to restrict new oil discoveries in the Middle East. Oil industrialization projects intensified after World War II due to a flood of petrodollars into OPEC countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Rising oil revenues and sovereign control achieved through oil nationalization triggered the execution of five-year development plans of industrial and infrastructural expansion. The birth of environmental activism in the 1960s–1970s coincided with the end of oil abundance and the fear of the planet’s destruction, spurring the passage of legislation to place limits on the hydrocarbon economy in which the machinery of oil industrialization had thrived.


Author(s):  
Karl P. Mueller

Air power refers to the use of aviation by nations and other political actors in the pursuit of power and security interests, along with the use of long-range missiles. Since armies and navies first began to experiment with the use of airplanes as implements of war, air power has emerged as an integral component of modern warfare. Air power was born in the crucible of World War I, but came of age in the conflagration of World War II. The developmental history of air power is significant to security studies in general and to the study of air power in particular. Owing to the rapid series of state changes in air power, trying to understand the nature of air power and its effects on modern warfare and international security has become more complicated. Two questions that are central to the study of international security are whether air power facilitates offense as a whole and whether it encourages aggression as a result. There has also been a debate over the issue of how air power can most effectively be used to coerce an enemy through strategic bombing. Another source of disagreement is the question of whether air and space power constitute one subject or two. In general, there are compelling merits in treating space power as a domain of national security theory and policy separate from those of land, sea, and air power.


Author(s):  
Mark Gerges

Cavalry, one of the three principal combat branches, has long been known as “the combat arm of decision.” This view, of a horse-mounted cavalry soldier delivering a charge at a gallop and turning a battlefield victory into a rout, is the idealized view of supporters. The role of cavalry, and whether it could continue to play a role on a battlefield dominated by firearms, has been the central debate since the 16th century. After cavalry forces lost their unquestioned battlefield dominance during the medieval period, the next four centuries witnessed a reevaluation and readjustment of their role. Others refused to admit to these changes, arguing for an unaltered role. The heyday of the mounted arm’s effectiveness came during the Napoleonic era (1799–1815), when a general equality among the various branches allowed cavalry its last true measure of shock effect as its principal mission. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the successive improvements in firearms technology threatened cavalry’s continued relevance on the battlefield. This professional debate climaxed in the period prior to World War I, as the most powerful nations discussed the experiences of the Boer War and Russo-Japanese War. World War I witnessed limited use of cavalry in the major theater, but large-scale use of horse cavalry in secondary theaters provided evidence for the supporters of animal-powered cavalry. World War II was the final large-scale use of horse cavalry, but this was due more to necessity than to continued relevance on the battlefield. As a field, the study of cavalry has been looked at by two camps of writers—one looking at the flashing swords and tales of glory, and the other looking at the arm as an adjunct to the major armies. Few scholarly works discuss cavalry across the breath of the period or how cavalry dealt with the issues of modernization or societal change. Recently, the historical community has reawakened to the debates concerning the proper role and missions of cavalry. Beginning in the early 1990s, the examination of the phenomenon of military revolutions and reemergence of disciplined infantry as the dominant arm on the battlefield has led to a number of works looking into the changes this caused in the cavalry, not only in its role on the battlefield but also as the purview of society’s elites.


Author(s):  
Valentina M. Moiseenko

The paper, devoted to the institutions of citizenship in Russia and citizenship in the USSR, presents issues related to the trends of international migration policy over a long historical period. Despite the inevitable fluctuations, with the beginning of the reforms of Peter I, the policy of citizenship in Russia becomes part of the state policy in the field of modernization and strengthening of Russia’s defense capability. In the long term, the policy of citizenship in Imperial Russia up to the February revolution can be defined as keeping the population out of Russian citizenship and attracting foreigners in certain periods. Episodic were the measures aimed at returning former subjects to Russia. This approach corresponded to the populationist concept of population, which is explained by the constant expansion of the territory of Russia. The liberal law of 1864, which defined the position of foreigners in Russia, contributed to the influx of foreign investment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The consequences of the law of 1864 were reflected in the strengthening of land and national contradictions. The state’s policy on emigration of Jews from Russia, which became widespread at the beginning of the XX century, also contributed to the growth of tension. the policy on citizenship and international migration changed fundamentally after October 1917 as a result of the ban on renouncing the citizenship of the RSFSR and the return to the USSR of the main part of the "white emigration". At the same time, accelerated industrialization determined the need to attract people to the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s. foreign specialists, and the international political situation — the influx of political emigrants to the USSR. On the agenda in the 1930s, judging by the legislation, the issues of deprivation of Soviet citizenship were relevant. After world war II, citizenship issues were similar to those that were the focus of attention after world war I and the civil war. It was about large-scale repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war and displaced persons who found themselves outside the USSR, population movements (options) as a result of the revision of state borders, and the return of prisoners of war who were on the territory of the USSR. The" warming " of international relations in the 1950s and 1970s objectively meant the expansion of the USSR’s international relations. A number of laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s actually extended the isolation of the USSR, although these laws failed to stop the growing emigration potential of Soviet Jews, as well as of a number of other nationalities. It is also characteristic that in these years the laws regulating the situation of foreigners and stateless persons in the USSR were adopted in conditions when the statistics of these categories of the population were not available for analysis. Against the backdrop of strong experience in the development and application of legislation governing relations between the state and the population in the area of acquisition and renunciation of citizenship in the form of an unbroken chain of laws, regulations, comments to the laws on citizenship and international migration in many countries around the world fear, the uniqueness of Russia is the existence of two approaches — pre-revolutionary and Soviet. This experience should not be underestimated when choosing a citizenship policy in the future.


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