Diasporic South Vietnam

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-86
Author(s):  
Hao Jun Tam

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequences from the diasporic Vietnamese literary archive: Vietnamese French author Ly Thu Ho’s trilogy and Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao’s pair of historical novels. Taking a historicist approach, the essay reveals complex nationalist expressions, aspirations, challenges, and desires in Ly Thu Ho’s and Lan Cao’s works of fiction.

Author(s):  
Robert H. Abzug

Rollo May (1909‒1994), internationally known psychologist and popular philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do “religious work” but eventually became a psychotherapist and in best-selling books like Love and Will and The Courage to Create he attracted an audience of millions of readers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. During the 1950s and 1960s, these books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritually-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. Psyche and Soul in America deals not only with May’s public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-279
Author(s):  
Lindsay Zafir

This article examines the gay French author Jean Genet’s 1970 tour of the United States with the Black Panther Party, using Genet’s unusual relationship with the Panthers as a lens for analyzing the possibilities and pitfalls of radical coalition politics in the long sixties. I rely on mainstream and alternative media coverage of the tour, articles by Black Panthers and gay liberationists, and Genet’s own writings and interviews to argue that Genet’s connection with the Panthers provided a queer bridge between the Black Power and gay liberation movements. Their story challenges the neglect of such coalitions by historians of the decade and illuminates some of the reasons the Panthers decided to support gay liberation. At the same time, Genet distanced himself from the gay liberation movement, and his unusual connection with the Panthers highlights some of the difficulties activists faced in building and sustaining such alliances on a broad scale.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos ◽  
Karen Schönwälder

With the passage of a new citizenship law in 1999 and the so-calledZuwanderungsgesetz (Migration Law) of 2004, contemporary Germanyhas gone a long way toward acknowledging its status as an immigrationcountry (Einwanderungsland). Yet, Germany is still regarded bymany as a “reluctant” land of immigration, different than traditionalimmigration countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia.It owes this image to the fact that many of today’s “immigrants”were in fact “guests,” invited to work in the Federal Republicin the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and expected to leave when they wereno longer needed. Migration was meant to be a temporary measure,to stoke the engine of the Economic Miracle but not fundamentallyalter German society. The question, then, is how did these “guestworkers” become immigrants? Why did the Federal Republicbecome an immigration country?


2003 ◽  
Vol 125 (10) ◽  
pp. 56-59
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Leaf

This article focuses on innovations done by engineers for spying. If there has been espionage, engineers have been a part of it. In World War II, infiltrators and downed pilots had to be able to find their way behind enemy lines. Compasses were hidden in cufflinks, pencil clips, and buttons. Maps were printed on rice paper so they wouldn't rustle when opened. British pilots wore special flying boots with cutaway tops that, when removed, left normal-looking shoes. Bugging is another method of the spy. The purpose of a bug is to detect sound vibrations in air or in other materials, such as wood, plaster, or metal. A good bug must reject unwanted noise, be easily concealed, and be energy efficient. The United States had an entire listening kit in the 1950s and 1960s with an assortment of accessories like a tie clip and wristwatch microphones.


Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Popp Berman

This chapter begins by introducing market-logic experiments undertaken in the mid-1970s. Like earlier efforts, these practices encountered limitations and did not, at the time, look poised to take off. But this time, things would be different, as a new idea started to gain influence in the policy realm. While economists had been looking seriously at the impact of innovation since the 1950s, policymakers' attention to the issue was limited before 1970. A spurt of interest in innovation in the early 1970s fizzled out when the economy rebounded briefly, but as the economy lost steam mid-decade, industry leaders, concerned with indicators suggesting that the United States was losing its technological leadership, began to push the idea that government needed to act to strengthen innovation. In the latter part of the decade, the innovation issue would become politically salient and influential, and would shape a variety of policies meant to strengthen the U.S. economy.


2018 ◽  
pp. 376-386
Author(s):  
Robert E. Lerner

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's final years. Kantorowicz died of a ruptured aneurysm in September 1963. Before this, he worked on a succession of recondite articles, attended the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy and the Byzantine Institute at “Oakbarton Dumps,” vacationed on the West Coast and the Virgin Islands, and carried on earnestly with his dining and imbibing. His politics also became more leftward from the postwar years until the time of his death. For a decade and a half he was deeply worried about the possibility of nuclear war, and he held the United States responsible. During the 1950s, he was bitterly hostile to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. On the day after Kennedy's inauguration, Kantorowicz wrote the he “couldn't be worse than Eisenhower, ” although he did change his mind.


2021 ◽  
pp. 92-122
Author(s):  
Jacob Darwin Hamblin

As with its overall foreign policy, the United States framed its atomic energy offerings as part of the global struggle between the “free world” and the communists, a division that masked the firm US military alignment with colonial powers. The United States continued that framing even as nations such as India and Ghana tried to forge a different path that associated atomic energy with the struggle for national or even racial liberation. The specter haunting Eisenhower and his successors was the emergence of a bloc of countries whose concerns were primarily racial and anti-colonial. Given the reality of racial segregation at home and the government’s close alliance with colonial powers of Europe, such a framing would put the United States on the side of the old colonial masters. American politicians utilized the promise of atomic energy to dim such perceptions amid numerous racially charged challenges in the 1950s and ’60s.


2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.


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