War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Europe. By David A. Messenger. War, Memory, and Culture. Edited by Steven Trout. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. Pp. xii+244. $79.95 (cloth); $39.95 (paper or e-book).

2021 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 688-689
Author(s):  
Wulf Kansteiner
Author(s):  
Justin D. Livingstone

This chapter follows the long arc of the ‘missionary novel’, from the exhortation and promotion emanating from a missionary culture embraced by a Protestant Christendom to a dissenting literary culture under siege from imperial servants, secularists, and postcolonial independence movements. It notes that the African missionary novel in particular provides fertile material for the investigation of Dissenting Protestantism as it engaged with the twentieth century. Many ‘humanitarian’ novels disseminated knowledge about mission fields and ‘new’ peoples, and so were part of (and criticized for) the globalizing imagination of early twentieth-century Europe and the spread of the professions. Case studies include Elsie Milligan, Arthur E. Southon, Ambrose Haynes, Marion Percy Williams, Arthur Chirgwin, Harry H. Johnston, and Joyce Cary, among others. The chapter extends the debate on mission and empire by directing attention to issues of postcolonial reception, disclosing the ways in which the so-called ‘dissidence of Dissent’ was both challenged and appropriated by anti-colonial authors in the mid to late twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Andy Lord

This chapter points to the ‘pluralization of the lifeworld’ involved in globalization as a key context for changing dissenting spiritualities through the twentieth century. These have included a remarkable upsurge in Spirit-movements that fall under categories such as Pentecostal, charismatic, neo-charismatic, ‘renewalist’, and indigenous Churches. Spirit language is not only adaptive to globalized settings, but brings with it eschatological assumptions. New spiritualities emerge to disrupt existing assumptions with prophetic and often critical voices that condemn aspects of the existing culture, state, and church life. This chapter outlines this process of disruption of the mainstream in case studies drawn from the USA, the UK, India, Africa, and Indonesia, where charismaticized Christianity has emerged and grown strongly in often quite resistant broader cultures.


Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.


Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny

Case studies of Indonesia and Japan illustrate that party-system stability in patronage democracies is deeply affected by the relative autonomy of political brokers. Over the course of a decade, a series of decentralizing reforms in Indonesia weakened patronage-based parties hold on power, with the 2014 election ultimately being a contest between two rival populists: Joko Widodo and Subianto Prabowo. Although Japan was a patronage democracy throughout the twentieth century, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remained robust to outsider appeals even in the context of economic and corruption crises. However, reforms in the 1990s weakened the hold of central factional leaders over individual members of the LDP and their patronage machines. This was instrumental to populist Junichiro Koizumi’s winning of the presidency of the LDP and ultimately the prime ministership of Japan. This chapter also reexamines canonical cases of populism in Latin America.


Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen ◽  
Ismar Dedović

Abstract This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.


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