scholarly journals Pioneers, Refugees, Exiles, and Transnationals: Gendering Diaspora in an Ethno-Religious Context

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-153
Author(s):  
Marlene Epp

Abstract This paper examines four women who immigrated to Canada within diasporas originating in disparate times and places: an Amish woman escaping persecution in Bavaria in the early nineteenth century; a woman displaced from Ukraine during the Second World War; a political exile from Central America in the 1980s; and a contemporary transnational migrant with homes in Canada and Mexico. While they all identify with a particular ethno-religious community, the Mennonites, their commonalities rest more on similar experiences of uprooting and settlement, as well as their familial roles. In the case of each story, the diasporic experience de-stabilized gender identities and revealed the mutability of ethno-religious markers. The paper suggests that frameworks of diaspora and transnational movement offer a better way to understand the gendered experiences of these women, rather than traditional ideological and progressive concepts of migration.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-278
Author(s):  
Martina Piperno

Reprinted in 1801, Vico's New Science (originally published 1744) had a profound impact on Bourbon Restoration culture, particularly in Italy and France, where it touched post-revolutionary readers profoundly. The reasons for Vico's revival in the early nineteenth century relate closely to the trauma of the political and social changes of that era. Vico's readership seems to have had significant peaks during periods of rapid social transformation: nineteenth-century readers reread the New Science in an attempt to find the reasons for revolutionary failure, and to relate the terror, the sense of displacement, failure and trauma to recognizable laws, promising that, after a crisis, a period of renaissance must necessarily follow. This article analyses the hermeneutic practices of some post-revolutionary readers of Vico (Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Ferrari, Ugo Foscolo, Francesco Lomonaco) and suggests a comparison with the practices of readers during the Second World War (Eric Auerbach, Carlo Levi, Mario Fubini). By doing so, I propose an interpretation of Vico's New Science as a ‘posthumous’ book, acquiring special shades of significance when its readers experience the feeling that nothing will ever be like before, and meditate upon it in isolation, in fear, in exile, upon return from the front, and in prison.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER M. R. STIRK

AbstractAlthough the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations.


Author(s):  
Cairns Craig

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.


Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski

This chapter considers a series of books, A to Polska właśnie (This is Indeed Poland). These books introduce their readers to various issues of interest to anyone studying Polish society. The chapter focuses on the volume Żydzi (The Jews), in particular, as it is the first to discuss an important group among Poland's population. The volume covers the period up to the second half of the eighteenth century, political and social problems from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, Jewish culture and religion in the nineteenth century, the period from the First World War until 1939, the Holocaust, and Jews in Poland after the Second World War. The chapter contends that this book should be regarded not as just one more study about Polish Jews, but as making a singular contribution to the promotion of knowledge about Jewish traditions, culture, and history in Poland.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1123-1160
Author(s):  
Daniel Hedinger ◽  
Moritz von Brescius

This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It shows how Germany and Japan—two imperial latecomers in the late nineteenth century—redefined imperialism and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before, and their violent imperial projects turned out to be radically new and different. While Europe had never seen an empire like Hitler’s, the same is true of East Asia and the so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945. The chapter, which focuses on a series of important moments from a trans-imperial perspective, highlights two points. First, it stresses that the German and Japanese empires had a shared history. Second, it shows that by their emergence as colonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Their histories are central to understand great power competition in the first half of the 20th century as well as the imperial nature of the World Wars.


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