'Je suis l'autre!' The Place of the Other in Blaise Cendrars's Œuvre

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-208
Author(s):  
Amotz Giladi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
The Other ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Blaise Cendrars ◽  
The Way

This article explores the way in which Blaise Cendrars portrayed three figures of otherness in his writings: the Jew, the German and the non-European Other. In light of Cendrars's ideological orientation and his evolving position in the French literary field, this piece proposes an analysis of his fluid and dynamic representations of the Other. Cendrars's poetic or narrative 'I' is at times inseparable from the Other he portrays, and at other times rejects the Other outright. Hence, the figure of the Wandering Jew, with which Cendrars's poetic 'I' often identifies, alternates with an association of Judaism with pathological sexuality. The German enemy is first represented as the ultimate Other, and then as a reflection of the narrative 'I' when Cendrars calls upon his experiences of World War I. Finally, Cendrars depicts the Non-European Other, both demonized and idealized, as the dark side of the European Self, particularly in his reportage of the 1930s.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Very Serious Books

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
World War ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Surplus Women ◽  
British Home ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Well Of Loneliness

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.

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.

Two Tolstoys and a Lenin—Temperance and Prohibition in Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
World War ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
State Revenue ◽  
State Finance ◽  
Leon Trotsky ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Way

Part I of the book—covering Europe’s continental empires—begins with Chapter 2 on the Russian Empire. The state’s overreliance on revenues from the imperial vodka monopoly is laid bare beginning with the temperance revolts of the 1850s, when the empire was almost bankrupted when peasants refused to drink. The understanding of temperance as opposition to imperial autocracy is traced through the antistatist teachings of Leo Tolstoy and early Bolsheviks, including the prohibitionists Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite official opposition to “subversive” temperance activism, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Tsar Nicholas II made Russia the first prohibitionist state, though the loss of state revenue paved the way for the revolutions of 1917. Lenin maintained a prohibition against the vodka trade, which was only undone after Lenin’s death by Joseph Stalin, who reintroduced the tsarist-era vodka monopoly in the interests of state finance.

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.

Safekeeping and Sifting: Observations on the German Reformed Tradition, 1900-1930

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Georg Plasger
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Nineteen Twenties ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
National Socialist Era

Abstract The German Reformed tradition between 1900 and 1930 has received little interest. Much more attention has been given to the Reformed churches during the National Socialist era and on acknowledging the massive influence of Karl Barth. The article gives an overview of the minority denomination of the Reformed confession in Germany. On the one hand we see that the Reformierte Bund, founded in 1884, breaks up during the Calvin jubilee of 1909. On the other hand, the crisis after World War I brought further difficulties. In the nineteen-twenties, a discussion grew about the function of the Reformed Confessions—are they to be kept intact and normative (so the Young Reformed line) or should they function to sift and sort out what is needed in each era and location (so Karl Barth)?

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