‘Wars of Resistance and Rebellion: The Myth of Protest and Popular Dissent against the Vietnam War in Australia and Canada’

This article traces the history of war resistance in both Australia and Canada during the era of the War in Vietnam that became so culturally resonant with popular dissent from the status quo. Unlike all other major international conflicts in the twentieth century, this war represented a point of departure for Canada and Australia. Australia faithfully committed fully to the American effort, while Canada refused to commit militarily, shifting its focus to one of diplomacy. This article provides a comparison of acts of resistance to the war, arguing that while the two countries resisted the war differently a sense of national identity shifted for both, even if slowly and subtly. The history of war and nationalism engendered through its engagement needs to be nuanced enough to view acts of resistance and protest as being integrally bound together. The inevitably politicised nature of war means that the memory of war and its practice is often viewed in complete distinction and isolation from war resistance and the memory of anti-war protest. War and war resistance, I argue, are not binary opposites, not two sides of the same socio-political coin. Instead, it calls for a consideration of these issues together and critically, not artificially separating war from peace and warring from acts of resistance to it.

The Communitas of Mourning: Women in Black and Dah Teatar between War protest and Theater

In wartime and post-war situations, the opposition of friend and enemy—based on national divisions—often condemns the dead “enemies” to be ungrievable. To grieve for the excluded others in such times means to break with the friend-enemy opposition. This article examines how the friend-enemy opposition is broken in the case of the actions of Women in Black and Dah Teatar in the context of the civil war in Yugoslavia. By analyzing the vigils of Žene u crnom (Women in Black) in Belgrade and the play Priča o čaju (The Story of Tea) by Dah Teatar, the author discusses the particular strategies through which grief was made possible beyond the friend-enemy opposition and how these strategies open a communitas of mourning. The term “communitas of mourning” refers to the concept of grievability, proposed by Judith Butler in Frames of War.

The Consequences of Contention: Understanding the Aftereffects of Political Conflict and Violence

What are the political and economic consequences of contention (i.e., genocide, civil war, state repression/human rights violation, terrorism, and protest)? Despite a significant amount of interest as well as quantitative research, the literature on this subject remains underdeveloped and imbalanced across topic areas. To date, investigations have been focused on particular forms of contention and specific consequences. While this research has led to some important insights, substantial limitations—as well as opportunities for future development—remain. In particular, there is a need for simultaneously investigating a wider range of consequences (beyond democracy and economic development), a wider range of contentious activity (beyond civil war, protest, and terrorism), a wider range of units of analysis (beyond the nation year), and a wider range of empirical approaches in order to handle particular difficulties confronting this type of inquiry (beyond ordinary least-squares regression). Only then will we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of what contention does and does not do politically and economically. This review takes stock of existing research and lays out an approach for looking at the problem using a more comprehensive perspective.

Lau, Alan Chong (1948--)

Alan Chong Lau is an American poet and visual artist. Lau began his poetic career in the wake of the 1970s Asian-American movement, a surge of racial political consciousness inspired by the civil rights and anti-war protest movements. His first book, published with friends Garrett Kaoru Hongo and Lawson Fusao Inada, was entitled The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1978) after the name they had given to themselves for a 1977 performance in Long Beach and after the highway that connected their childhood homes in different parts of California. The book is a series of peripatetic romps in a beat style refashioned for an Asian-American context. In comparison, Songs of Jadina (1980), Lau’s first monograph and the winner of an American Book Award in 1981, is a much more contemplative, nuanced exploration of Chinese American history and the poet’s ancestry. In 2000, he published his second monograph, Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker’s Journal, which is a poetic record of his experiences in Seattle. His most recent book of poems, no hurry (2007), is a reflection about his travels to Japan. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lau also became an active painter, developing a unique style that blended elements of Chinese calligraphy and the Northwest School. A retrospective of his work was shown at the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle in 2012.

Maternal Cosmopoetics

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922–3 cycle War addresses themes of maternal sacrifice and nationalist mobilization that also figure in women’s poetry. Her anti-war protest in Sacrifice depicts a mother who raises her infant, echoing Jacques Louis David’s defiant mother in his Sabine Women. Likewise Anna Akhmatova’s blasphemous ‘Prayer’ offers to sacrifice her child and poetry to halt the war, and poems by Berta Lask and Claire Studer Goll condemn women’s own silence for the mobilization of their dead sons. Kollwitz’s cosmopoetic theme of maternal solidarity in The Mothers binds figures visually, just as dialogue in Lask weaves a sisterhood of protest. The woodcut Volunteers places her son Peter with his blinded, suicidal friends led by Death; similarly, Ricarda Huch’s poems of 1917 expose hollow wartime exhortations to heroic combat that blind and destroy young men. Kollwitz’s post-war poster Never Again War complements Gertrud Kolmar’s protest against war commemorations as the tawdry dazzle of nationalist remobilization.