Under Suspicion: Christine Brooke-Rose, Intelligence Work, and the Theory Wars

This article looks at Christine Brooke-Rose's late work of life-writing, Remake (1996) and its depiction of Brooke-Rose's wartime experience working in the Allied code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. I situate Remake's recall of Bletchley Park within a textual matrix that includes Brooke-Rose's own academic writing of the 1980s–90s, as well as texts that emerged out of the so-called ‘Theory Wars’ of the same period – especially relating to the revelation of Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism. In this range of writing, I trace a set of common concerns regarding personal history, suspicion, secrecy, disclosure, and mastery that herald a turn towards other forms of knowing. In doing so, I locate Remake at a crucial juncture in the emergence of our present post-critical moment.

Holocaust Survivor Diaspora(s)

This chapter discusses the evolution of “Holocaust survivor diasporas” in the aftermath of World War II by examining how the experience of survival under Nazi occupation created a distinct and shared identity for those who would emerge from the war. In the early postwar period, survivors formed transnational networks on the basis of shared wartime experience, common geographical origin, and shared political agendas that were far more specific than the more general category of “Holocaust survivors” that would develop later, in the last decades of the twentieth century. Survivors and the distinct organizations they formed came to play a prominent role in both defining the categories of “Holocaust” and “survivor” and in shaping subsequent efforts at Holocaust education and memorialization.

Shakespeare’s Clarence

This article argues that Shakespeare’s George of Clarence is a war veteran traumatised by his wartime experience, and that he can be regarded as a prototype of the modern shell-shocked soldier. Seizing on Jonathan Shay’s study on war trauma, it explores how Clarence becomes traumatised through a trajectory of degradation of personality due to his commander’s breach of themis in 3Henry VI. Edward’s breach of honour triggers the destabilisation of Clarence’s character, which, the article argues, suffers a traumatic breakdown in consequence of the murdering of Prince Edward. Turning to Richard III, the article explores how Clarence is haunted by his war trauma by examining Clarence’s insulation in the Tower of London, which powerfully symbolises the medieval veteran’s postwar dilemma. The repetition of war trauma is further borne out by Clarence’s nightmare, which, the article suggests, is not unlike the compulsive dream that occurs to the Freudian veteran after the Great War.

When a Global War Befell a Global City: Recent Historiography on Wartime Shanghai

Shanghai was the first Chinese city to bear the full brunt of Japanese aggression during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). This historiographical article reviews the development of the study of wartime Shanghai in Chinese- and English-language academia in the past two decades. In the People’s Republic of China, Shanghai’s history during World War II has long been a favorite topic for academic historians. In the English-speaking world, however, the history of Shanghai’s wartime experience has only recently become a popular research topic. This article introduces many significant works related to wartime Shanghai, lays out important areas of inquiry, and identifies key historiographical trends. Its conclusion offers some suggestions on how the study of wartime Shanghai can be further advanced in the future.

Making History Visible

While interned by the Nazis in Belgium and Bavaria during World War II, the little-known Surinamese artist Josef Nassy (1904–76) created a series of paintings and drawings documenting his experiences and those of other black prisoners. Nassy’s artworks uniquely register the presence of Caribbean, African, and African American prisoners in the Nazi camp system. While the Nassy Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cannot render transparent a wartime experience that has gone largely unrecorded, it illustrates how shifting from a textual to a visual lens can enable an unremembered history to enter our field of vision, thereby generating an alternative wartime narrative. After tracing Nassy’s family history in Suriname and the conditions of his European incarceration, this essay discusses two paintings that demonstrate the significance of visual art in the context of black civilian internment—for both the artist-prisoner and the researcher.

The Body as a Source of Meaning in the Culture of Remembrance: The Reputational Entrepreneurship of the Characters of Yugoslav National Heroes

The aim of this paper is to explore the patterns and meanings to be found in the characters of Yugoslav national heroes who met a violent death in World War II. These are heroes who belong to the type of martyr heroes, and their sacrifice is highly rated in all patriotic mythologies. Created to denote the heroism of the chosen, they have sublimated the meaning and symbolism of one remembrance of the war. The death of these national heroes will be analyzed through their official biographies, which served to represent the characters of the National Heroes of Yugoslavia and keep the heroic symbol-names ever present in the collective group memory. Through their characters, a specific wartime experience and the martyr’s death of the national hero who died for the freedom of the Yugoslav peoples, as seen by the victors in this war drama, were transmitted to the citizens of Yugoslavia. Various patterns of wartime heroism (warrior, martyr, leader heroism) were represented as national patriotism, and the fighters and martyrs of the war of national liberation were named. The characteristics of the reputational entrepreneurship of these heroes’ characters are specifically explored, taking into account the characteristics of the discourse through which they were interpreted and presented. On the other hand, the limitations of this discourse provide an opportunity to deconstruct certain common traits of a certain hero type and discover the latent meanings conveyed by the characters of Yugoslav national heroes as actors of a historical-political myth.

Emerging Discourses, Changing Perspectives: Iraq in Oscar Documentary Films

Documentary film has become an important tool to seek information. This study shows how documentaries are projecting skepticism and sarcasm of Iraqi people due to volatile, uncertain complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. The fims discussed in this study consists of Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary films from 2003 to 2011 with a total of 45 films. The year 2003 is selected for its demarcation of U.S.-led invasion of Iraq which started in March 2003 and toppled over the government of Saddam Hussein. The year 2011 denotes the end with the departure of US troops in 2011. Through the criterion sampling, four films are selected that depict Iraq and all the four got the nomination for Oscar that includes: Iraq in Fragments (2006-Nomination); My Country My Country (2006-N); No End in Sight (2007-N); Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007-N). To explore Iraqi people’s perspectives, further sampling is applied and two documentaries are selected depicting entanglement of religion and politics in Iraq from Iraqi people’s perspective.

The Heroic Substitute

For white men, conscription posed a racially destabilizing proximity to enslavement; for African Americans, it opened up possibilities of citizenship and inclusion in the state’s population. Analyzing the recruitment efforts of Frederick Douglass, this chapter pushes back against critical race theory’s near-universally dim view of state power, and argues that military service held positive value for free black people and recently freed slaves. At the same time, the chapter draws on critical race theory to show how Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) countered the racialization of biopower. Set during the war and its aftermath, the novel is structured—like the draft—by a narrative logic of substitution, which recurs at the level of character and plot. Harper offers a wide spectrum of the wartime experience of African Americans, who saw in the draft—as in military service more broadly—a chance for state recognition as fully participating civic actors.