links and nonfiction reviews
Literally unbelievable. I learned my lesson about sharing Onion stories without very clear labeling years ago, when I posted a link about a (fake) ridiculous trademark claim and some foreign students took it literally. And I don't blame them--this is America; who knows what weirdness the law is capable of?
The Iliad as fanfic. (I like that framing better than “Odyssey fanfic,” because the former pushes the canon out into some further distance, and also because this particular piece seems to me a very in-the-present-moment style, very much “how we are writing fanfic now.”)
Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture: Difficult project because it ends up talking about culture, not just visual culture, given the primacy of the visual. Makes for a sprawling overview of lots of cultural/film/etc. theory of the past fifty years or so.
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq: Fascinating and passionate comparative study drawing many contrasts and parallels, for example the immediate and uncritical adoption of “Ground Zero” for the WTC site that built on the US history of not thinking too hard about who’d been killed in Japan and erasing the Allies’ own history of “terror bombing.” Pearl Harbor was a tactical success for Japan but a strategic disaster, and many observers blamed Japanese culture for that catastrophic decision, but the US made similar decisions to choose war in Iraq; etc. Ethnocentrism emerges as as both denigration of the other as irrational and weak and ignorance of one’s own weaknesses: “they” won’t react like “we” will (which is why they’ll accept humiliation and learn their place, as both the Japanese and the Americans expected about their respective choices). He’s particularly brutal about the use of Japan’s postwar reconstruction as a model for Iraq, given that it proceeded completely differently, not least with a plan in place early on that involved substantial government guidance of the economy, as opposed to outsourcing reconstruction to US contractors who saw Iraq as a profit center along with a free-market ideology readily perceived by the rest of the world as its own form of looting.
John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II: Another really interesting history, this time of the American occupation of Japan. Dower argues that the Americans were more committed to the preservation of the Emperor than many average Japanese, and so they didn’t investigate his war responsibility or explore the possibility of a postwar political order without at least having the Emperor as symbolic head of the nation. He also details the hardship and despair of the postwar years; the way in which the American occupation turned the focus away from the atrocities the Japanese armies had committed against non-Americans; the sometimes exhilarating and sometimes terrifying sense that all the past boundaries had fallen away; the sexual liberation (though he’s pretty sanguine about prostitution as the best alternative for many young women under the circumstances); and the pervasive censorship that prevented almost any portrayal of the occupiers and then switched near the end from suppressing anything that smacked of militarism to suppressing anything leftist, as the US switched its position from demilitarizing Japan to demanding rearmament in order to help contain the Soviets.
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery: History of Lincoln’s relationship with slavery and to some extent with African-Americans. Lincoln never had much use for slavery, but he also began with very little use for African-Americans and supported colonization for a while as a solution to the slave problem. This changed over the course of the war. Foner emphasizes the extent to which the slaves liberated themselves, changing the facts on the ground and forcing the North to recognize that people who’d been slaves were not going to go away when slavery did.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
The Iliad as fanfic. (I like that framing better than “Odyssey fanfic,” because the former pushes the canon out into some further distance, and also because this particular piece seems to me a very in-the-present-moment style, very much “how we are writing fanfic now.”)
Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture: Difficult project because it ends up talking about culture, not just visual culture, given the primacy of the visual. Makes for a sprawling overview of lots of cultural/film/etc. theory of the past fifty years or so.
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq: Fascinating and passionate comparative study drawing many contrasts and parallels, for example the immediate and uncritical adoption of “Ground Zero” for the WTC site that built on the US history of not thinking too hard about who’d been killed in Japan and erasing the Allies’ own history of “terror bombing.” Pearl Harbor was a tactical success for Japan but a strategic disaster, and many observers blamed Japanese culture for that catastrophic decision, but the US made similar decisions to choose war in Iraq; etc. Ethnocentrism emerges as as both denigration of the other as irrational and weak and ignorance of one’s own weaknesses: “they” won’t react like “we” will (which is why they’ll accept humiliation and learn their place, as both the Japanese and the Americans expected about their respective choices). He’s particularly brutal about the use of Japan’s postwar reconstruction as a model for Iraq, given that it proceeded completely differently, not least with a plan in place early on that involved substantial government guidance of the economy, as opposed to outsourcing reconstruction to US contractors who saw Iraq as a profit center along with a free-market ideology readily perceived by the rest of the world as its own form of looting.
John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II: Another really interesting history, this time of the American occupation of Japan. Dower argues that the Americans were more committed to the preservation of the Emperor than many average Japanese, and so they didn’t investigate his war responsibility or explore the possibility of a postwar political order without at least having the Emperor as symbolic head of the nation. He also details the hardship and despair of the postwar years; the way in which the American occupation turned the focus away from the atrocities the Japanese armies had committed against non-Americans; the sometimes exhilarating and sometimes terrifying sense that all the past boundaries had fallen away; the sexual liberation (though he’s pretty sanguine about prostitution as the best alternative for many young women under the circumstances); and the pervasive censorship that prevented almost any portrayal of the occupiers and then switched near the end from suppressing anything that smacked of militarism to suppressing anything leftist, as the US switched its position from demilitarizing Japan to demanding rearmament in order to help contain the Soviets.
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery: History of Lincoln’s relationship with slavery and to some extent with African-Americans. Lincoln never had much use for slavery, but he also began with very little use for African-Americans and supported colonization for a while as a solution to the slave problem. This changed over the course of the war. Foner emphasizes the extent to which the slaves liberated themselves, changing the facts on the ground and forcing the North to recognize that people who’d been slaves were not going to go away when slavery did.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.