Los polacos en la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939): durante el conflicto y después

Polish citizens and people of Polish descent played a considerably significant role in the Spanish Civil War. They fought on both sides of the conflict, however, most of them in the Republican Army (4,500-5,000 among ca. 35,000 soldiers of the International Brigades). Approximately 75% of them comprised of immigrants, mainly from France, who were predominantly either activists or supporters of the French Communist Party. Only 600-800, or according to some sources 1200 individuals, the majority of whom were communists (80% or more), were believed to come directly from Poland. The highest number of volunteers fought within the ranks of 13th Brigade “Jarosław Dąbrowski”, which took part in the major key operations and suffered huge losses amounting to 30-40%. A few dozens of Poles fought in the Gen. F. Franco’s National Army. Most of them were professional soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion, who had joined it before the war broke out, so their participation in the war was not dictated by ideological reasons. The author adopts synthesizing approach to portray the Polish soldiers fighting for each side of the conflict, including their background and involvement in the most important military operations. The article pays an attention to the fates of Polish veterans of the International Brigades referred to as “Dąbrowszczacy” during the World War II and, following this, an attempt to demonstrate the specific role and changes “Dąbrowszczacy” were undergoing within the political system of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL).

The Complexities of Exile, the Other, and the Postcolonial Predicament in Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cáit Murphy argues that Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) expresses an “accented style,” citing Hamid Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema in his 2001 study, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Drawing on Denis’s own exilic background, Murphy analyzes the depiction of contradictory exile in Denis’s film. Working from Naficy’s criteria for accented cinema, such as epistolarity, cultural hybridity, and Bakhtinian chronotopes, Murphy argues that the film’s protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant) and the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti are paradoxical representations of belonging and Otherness.

{ Introduction }

The introduction uses the 2005 memoir of a Mexican American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, along with accounts of other Latina/o soldiers who fought in France during WWI and WWII, to illustrate the inadequacy of extant paradigms and hermeneutic practices for explicating the expansive and ideologically discrepant range of Latina/o spatial ontologies and uniquely globalized identities from the midnineteenth to twenty-first centuries. It simultaneously introduces a new theory for Latina/o literature that draws upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence Studies—violentología—to adapt a flexible yet historically grounded method for identifying how Latina/o identities throughout time and place, or chronotopes, are undergirded by various forms of violence. These intersecting yet unique Latina/o formations extend through and beyond conventional theories of Latina/o citizenship, nationality, and history, as well as Latina/o identity, culture, and ideology—or Latininidades—and thus are identified as supra-Latina/o violentologies. This new and expansive category accommodates a fuller range of complex Latina/o modalities across geopolitical terrain and the ideological gamut. The subsequent introduction of proliferating and increasingly diverse Latinidades thus foregrounds a new era for Latina/o Studies.

Moral Angst

This chapter analyzes a little-known episode of moral panic during the 1950s: the alleged abduction of young German men into the French Foreign Legion. Fears and fantasies of the Foreign Legion reflected a widespread sense of popular humiliation and limited sovereignty vis-à-vis the Western allies during that decade. Fears of the abduction of young Germans into the Legion reflected deep-seated concerns regarding the safety and integrity of male youth, which formed the core constituency of postwar reconstruction. The alleged “recruiter” as “folk devil” represented the absolute opposite of normative male citizenship. Cultural representations cast the recruiter as effeminate, foreign, and potentially homosexual, as well as displaying some of the stereotypical antisemitic features of the Jewish “other.” By the late 1950s, the growing recognition that young men entered the Legion out of their own volition shifted public attention from fear of recruiters to concerns about the fragility of male youth in postwar society. West German anxieties regarding the Legion began to focus on the inner resilience and resistance of young German men rather than the external threat of seduction by French-paid recruiters. This shift from externally to internally generated fears and anxieties anticipated a general shift in the history of fear and anxiety in West Germany from the late 1950s onward.

Clarice’s Secret. On The Foreign Legion (A legião estrangeira, 1964) by Clarice Lispector

The 13 stories of the collection The Foreign Legion (A legião estrangeira, 1964), the first appearance of Clarice Lispector in Bulgarian, are a piece of hypnotic writing that is difficult to compare with any other writer’s language of that time. On the one hand, this prose has a memory of the European modernism with the experimental spirit of the Left Bank of the Seine, with elements of literary cubism and delicate traces of Judaic mysticism… On the other hand, the European refinement and suffistication are literally shaken by the local culture with its smell of jungle and its colorfully hysterical Latin American Catholicism.

SOE operations in Albania during the Second World War

After Mussolini entered World War II on the side of Hitler, the British sent a colonel into Albania in April 1941 to help the resistance, but he was soon captured. It would not be until April 16, 1943, that two more SOE officers, Lt. Col. Neil McLean and Captain David Smiley, parachuted into northern Greece and crossed the border. Others would follow, including a former lieutenant in the Spanish Foreign Legion, Peter Kemp; Himalayan explorer Bill Tillman; and Reginald Hibbert, whose view of events in Albania in the years to come would put him bitterly at odds with his fellow SOE officers. SOE operations were hampered by woeful British ignorance about Albania. London had only a lower-level diplomatic presence there before the Italian occupation, and the main source of information had been an elderly Englishwoman who had lived there for 20 years. This paper told the story of SOE operations in Albania.

Professional Adaptation of North Caucasians in Emigration (1920–1930s, France)

This article considers models of the professional arrangement of North Caucasian émigrés in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Using new archival and field ethnographic materials, we explore the social and political activities of North Caucasians as a profession and as a view of life; and the activities of the Caucasian group of oil owners (leader — Nobel), who before the Revolution were engaged in oil production in the Caucasus or owned shares of oil firms. France had the most cars in Europe for the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, it was not surprising that many emigrants from Russia, including North Caucasians, began working as chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and auto mechanics. In addition, they often became employees of auto factories (e. g. as specialists and laborers). Since there were many military people among North Caucasian émigrés, many they decided to join the French Foreign Legion. Emigrants from the North Caucasus pursued publishing, literary, journalistic, scientific, and teaching activities. In Russia many North Caucasians received a legal education but could not work as lawyers in France. Medical activity was also rare. In emigration there were several North Caucasians who became artists, singers, and dancers who performed in restaurants opened by North Caucasians. The children of the first wave of North Caucasian emigrants, as a rule, received higher education in France, and many of them managed to obtain excellent careers.

IV: POLITICS IN THE 1930s

My first visit in a parliamentary capacity to Republican Spain was in the autumn of 1934. I had heard on reliable authority that a rising of the miners in the Asturias had been suppressed with extreme brutality. The Spanish Foreign Legion had been brought over from Africa, and they had meted punishment on wives and families as well as on the militant miners. It was therefore suggested that Miss Ellen Wilkinson M.P. and I should go to Spain on a humanitarian mission, and to point out to the Spanish authorities that much harm was being done to our relations with Spain by the atrocity stories appearing in the British press.

Colonial Violence and the Roots of Fascist Writing

This article explores the connection between fascist writing and modern colonialism through the analysis of several works produced by F.T. Marinetti, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, and Ernst Jünger. Each of them visited Africa at some point in their lives. Marinetti spent fall 1911 in Libya, where he reported on the Turco-Italian War; his chronicles were collected in La Bataille de Tripoli (1912). Sánchez Mazas was sent to Morocco in fall 1921 as the war correspondent for El pueblo vasco, a daily that published his series of articles - “La campaña de África” - on the Rif War. Jünger went to Algeria in 1913 to receive training as a new member of the French Foreign Legion, an episode that he would novelize in Afrikanische Spiele (1936). This study contends that the stay of these three writers in Africa was an event that, together with other factors, determined their fascism.