Heroines of Compassion and National Consolers: The Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation and the Politics of Memory

The article explores the politics of memory surrounding the Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation (VWMF) – the grassroots organization that led the campaign to establish the Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington, DC. Drawing on archival material, public statements, and interviews with members of the group, it demonstrates that the organization used the ambivalences and anxieties surrounding the Vietnam War's remembrance to argue for the commemoration of women who served during the war. The VWMF portrayed those women as heroines of compassion – similar to men in terms of courage and selflessness, but different because of their benignity and benevolence. However, the VWMF's depiction of women's compassion was informed by national loyalties and sentiments; it acknowledged Vietnamese civilians only as objects of American goodwill, and failed to engage with ethical questions concerning American intervention in Vietnam. By drawing attention to women's dedication and compassion, the organization carried out a symbolic rehabilitation of American actions in Vietnam. It contributed to solidifying the dominant mode of representing the Vietnam War through the lens of American military sacrifice and fostered an understanding of the Vietnam War as an American national event.

“God save us always from the innocent and the good”: American versus European Exceptionalism in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

This essay argues that by challenging the rectitude of American intervention in Vietnam, The Quiet American is the means by which Greene criticises the American exceptionalism of the post-World War 2 era. It shows how the nation’s exceptionalism is built upon a fantasy of American idealism that masks the true intentions hidden behind America’s crusade against Communism. It proposes also that Greene uses his novel to highlight the existence of a European exceptionalism as potent as its transatlantic equivalent, and one much overlooked in contemporary discourse on Vietnam. The crux of Greene’s critique is located in Alden Pyle. Propped up by what Said describes as “structures of attitude and reference”, the article argues that Pyle’s rhetoric and actions demonstrate the blind commitment to American exceptionalism that Greene challenges in the text. The essay uses Donald Pease’s concept of the State of Exception to draw a parallel between the British journalist Thomas Fowler and Pyle to argue that in orchestrating the assassination of the latter, Fowler adopts the moral purpose that had prompted much of the American aid worker’s actions throughout the novel. It argues that this European version of exceptionalism comes from what Greene believed to be the suitability of European powers to oversee change in Vietnam, one that America was ill-equipped to handle. The essay ends by suggesting that The Quiet American was not so much what Diana Trilling described as “Mr Greene’s affront to America”, but an attempt to defend Europe amidst the onset of American dominance.

A Critique of American Supremacist Politics in Cold War in Sorayya Khan's City of Spies

The present study investigates the representation of America in Anglophone Pakistani Literature with a special focus on Sorayya Khan's City of Spies with the assumption to trace some possible connection between American intervention and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the context of Pakistan's politics. Given the American intervention in Pakistani politics and its indelible impact on the domestic and international scenario had made the country a virtual battleground for the superpowers of the world. Khan's novel situates this conflict in the aftermath of the military coup of General Zia, followed by the Afghan war and (c)overt American alliance in it, which brought about serious implications for the Pakistani state. The story of the novel offers some pertinent extracts which deal, literally or metaphorically, with the role and representation of America in these geostrategic events. The article has used the critical cultural angle by investing the theoretical views of Ziauddin Sardar in terms of the Muslim world's apathy for America in the aftermath of cold war politics are used to get a better insight into the central problem by underscoring how this foreign policy of America has been responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan.

Il laboratorio intellettuale di Bruno Trentin (2001-2006)

A selection of Trentin’sdiaries from 2001-2006, some unpublished pages on his political activity in the European Parliament and the elaboration of The Freedom Comes First: these works allow us to enter Bruno Trentin's intellectual laboratory and to follow, from the inside, the editing of the essays and the realization of the volume. Public and private intertwine in a melee with a heavy depression, which demands to "cope with death by accelerating the production of writings that can clarify or conclude my testimony." The notes on the Italian and international situation after September 11th, 2001, the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 and the European Constitution project are significant. The section is completed by some coeval political interventions, including the last article of July 2006 on meritocracy and the affirmation of individual rights.

A War Time Love Affair: The Round Table and The New Republic, c.1914–1919

Against the backdrop of the Great War a seemingly unlikely transatlantic romance blossomed between the deeply imperialist Round Table journal founded by “Milner’s Kindergarten,” a cadre of young former colonial administrators in Great Britain, and the American progressive standard-bearer The New Republic. The rhetoric of The New Republic in these years was deeply influenced by political Anglo-Saxon thought, as exemplified in The Round Table. Political Anglo-Saxonism was the belief that Anglo-Saxons were uniquely prepared for both self-governance and colonial governance. Adherents judged others’ capacity to self-govern against idealized Anglo norms. Both The Round Table (1910) and The New Republic (1914), from their inaugural issues on, sought national solutions for national problems utilizing a shared rhetoric of national efficiency. During the Great War this shared nationalist-progressivism drew the two groups together facilitating The New Republic’s founders’ early (1915) embrace of American intervention in the war. These connections are illuminated here through the interactions of The New Republic founders: Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl with key members of the British Round Table set, including Lionel Curtis, Philip Henry Kerr, Alfred Zimmern, and the prominent American “imperial school” historian George Louis Beer.