Journal articles on the topic 'British literature 1945-'

Abstract This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2 British Fiction Pre-1945; 3. British Fiction 1945 to the Present; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7. British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Matthew Levay; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Catriona Livingstone; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Graham Saunders and William Baker; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon.

The research investigates a publishing history of the Britansky Souyznik (British Ally) weekly (further - British Weekly) in Russian language, which was published in the Soviet Union by the UK Ministry of Information in the Second World War years and to 1950. This newspaper published reports from fronts where British troops fought against Nazi Germany and its allies, articles on British-Soviet military cooperation, materials about British science, industry, agriculture, and transport, reports on people’s life in the UK, historical background of British Commonwealth countries, cultural and literature reviews. British Weekly circulation in the USSR was 50,000 copies. The main method used for the research was the study of the newspaper’s materials, as well as the propaganda concepts of its editorial board and their influence on the audience. The researched materials are from archives of the Soviet Foreign Ministry as well as of the UK Ministry of Information and Political Warfare Executive (1940-1945), declassified by the British Government only in 2002, on the basis of which an independent analysis is conducted. The British Weekly played a bright role in the formation of techniques and methods of British foreign policy propaganda to Soviet public opinion in 1942-1945. Results of the research indicates that the British government launched foreign policy propaganda to the USSR immediately after breaking-out of World War II and used the experience of the British Weekly for psychological warfare in the Cold War years.

Youssef Chatani, Dissension among Allies: Ernest Bevin's Palestine Policy between Whitehall and the White House, 1945–1947 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), 156 pp., £25.00 (hb), ISBN 0–86356–999.Moshe Gat, Britain and the Conflict in the Middle East, 1964–1967: The Coming of the Six-Day War (London: Praeger, 2003), 216 pp., £39.99 (hb), ISBN 0–27597–514–2.Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 684 pp., £19.95 (pb), ISBN 1–86064–811–8.Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 308 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0–71465–397–7.Jonathan Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 252 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0–33398–451–X.

AbstractThis article reconsiders the life of Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947) – British Minister of Education from 1945 to 1947 and leader of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 – by exploring the transnational aspect of her politics. It seeks to establish the significance of her transnational orientation and how this can allow us to complement and deepen existing understandings of her. Drawing on the literature on transnational activist networks, it outlines the complexity of transnational networks and her repertoire of transnational political practice. Without serious attention to this global dimension of her politics, our understanding of Wilkinson is attenuated and distorted. Crucially, the heroic construction of “Red Ellen” in both labourist and socialist-feminist narratives has obscured her second radicalization (1932–1936) and the sharpness of her metamorphosis into a mainstream Labour Party figure in 1939–1940.

In 1944, Robert Kuczynski, a demographer working with the Colonial Office, wrote a memo discussing plans for a postwar census of the British Empire. He called for the creation of a Colonial Demographic Service, arguing that Colonial Office programs “offer no guarantee of a decisive improvement unless there is an expert on the spot to make an effective use of these means.” Kuczynski's firm belief in the need for expert knowledge matched the growing willingness of the Colonial Office to call upon experts in a variety of fields to assist in the reshaping of colonial government. This article examines why demography came to be seen as useful for colonial governance in the interwar years and how officials attempted to make use of demographers and demographic information in the final years of the British Empire. At present, this topic falls between several existing literatures. Works by Richard Soloway, Daniel Kelves, and others document the domestic history of demography in Great Britain, particularly its involvement in debates over hereditarian views of population. At the international level, most recent studies deal with the United States and trace the origins of American support for programs of population control after 1945. Still another body of literature chronicles the unique nature of policy formation in Britain and its relationship with social science in the twentieth century. This article seeks to connect these literatures by focusing on the colonial and international role of British demography from the end of World War I to the postcolonial era of the 1960s.

We explore the reasons for the unexpected defeat of Winston Churchill's Conservatives by Labour in the British general election of 1945. Was the outcome a result of Churchill's election campaign errors, as many have supposed, or did the coming-of-age of a new political generation make it a foregone conclusion? Much controversy in the partisanship literature centres on whether electoral realignments result primarily from conversion of existing voters or from mobilization of previously non-voting individuals. In particular, the 1930s US realignment has been the focus of considerable debate. In this article we shed new light on realignment processes by examining the 1945 British realignment that brought the Labour party to power. We find that, in this more straightforward case, the critical impetus came from new voters rather than from converts. Our findings raise questions that need to be confronted in the analysis of other realignments, such as that accompanying the American New Deal. They also shed new light on a much-interpreted episode in British electoral history.

This article examines how P.E.N., an organisation born in imperial Britain, endeavoured in some cases and floundered in others to create conditions for collaboration between Indian and British writers. Drawing on the P.E.N. archives at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC), I examine communication among and between Indian and British writers in P.E.N.'s orbit during the World War II era and leading up to the Indian Independence Act of 1947. As a forum for collaboration among writers internationally not only to develop writing and editing projects together, but also to forge a unifying conception for the modern era of the relationship between literature and political freedom, P.E.N. aimed to create opportunities for exchange among Indian and British writers. Analysing Indian writers' articulation of the necessary conditions for cross-imperial collaboration, I consider how mutuality was compromised under political conditions of imperialism hinging on hierarchal notions of culture.

Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.

This article explores the literature and film produced by the writers and filmmakers sent by the British and Americans to occupied Germany in the four years after the war. Although these figures were intended to help transform the mentality of the Germans, it is argued here that they had less effect on Germany than Germany had on them, and that the crucial (albeit unwitting) result of their visits to Germany was the creation of a genre of art here named ‘outsider rubble literature’ or Fremdentrümmerliteratur. This is a genre that asked, ultimately, what right the Allies had to judge Germany from outside when they were guilty too. It comprises a series of fundamentally ambivalent works of art that often manifest their ambivalence by juxtaposing the two forms of destruction experienced in Germany: the destruction of the bombed cities and the destruction wrought in the concentration camps. The article suggests that this genre of ‘outsider rubble literature’ includes Thomas Mann's great postwar novel Doktor Faustus, arguing that our understanding of this novel is increased if we read it alongside the postwar writing of Stephen Spender, Martha Gellhorn and Klaus Mann, and the postwar filmmaking of Billy Wilder.

The image of housing as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state has been widely used in recent years, and is clearly an attractive metaphor in the present period as residualisation deepens and privatisation continues. However, this paper is concerned with the early years of the postwar welfare state, when conditions for a securely founded housing service were, arguably, more conducive than they are today. Accordingly the paper focuses on policy work in the 1940s, drawing on new research on Public Record Office files, to reveal the amount of wartime planning within Whitehall for postwar housing policy, and the extent of continuity between the pre and post 1945 periods. It is shown that under the wartime coalition government there was considerably more planning for housing after the war than is acknowledged in the existing literature, and that this work shaped policy under the Labour government of 1945–51. Housing emerged as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state because of the amount of detailed wartime planning and Labour's acceptance of its analysis and prescriptions. Whereas most accounts concentrate on the size of the late 1940s building programme (and judge the government accordingly), the argument here is that to understand how housing emerged as the wobbly pillar it is necessary to look beyond quantity to the question of why a self-proclaimed socialist government failed to challenge the market dominance of housing provision.

The article attempts to solve one of the mysteries of the world literary process of the 20th century. The author explains the reasons for the unusual choice of the Nobel Committee, which presented the outstanding British politician Winston Churchill in 1953 with the prize in literature, preferring him to such recognized masters as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Jerome Salinger.According to the researcher, the choice of the Nobel Committee was determined by a number of factors: Churchill’s undoubted literary talent, manifested, however, first of all, in historical and memoir literature; the vast artistic legacy created by Churchill in these genres; outstanding public speaking skills of a British politician; charisma and political authority of his personality, as well as the circumstances of his life.Winston Churchill’s political, literary, and journalistic heritage retains its significance today, and his participation in the 1945 Yalta Conference lends the study a geographical proximity to Crimea. At the same time, the article allows for a specific historical example to analyze the decision-making mechanisms to award the most prestigious literary prize in the world.

Abstract In 1945, Mahmooda Rizvia, a prominent Urdu author from Sindh, published a travel account of her journey across the Arabian Sea from British India to Iraq during World War II. In her travel account, Rizvia conceptualized the declining British Empire as a dynamic space for Muslim renewal that connected India to the Middle East. Moreover, she fashioned a singular autobiographical persona as an Urdu literary pioneer and woman traveler in the Muslim lands of the British Empire. In her writings, Rizvia focused on her distinctive observations of the ocean, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and her home province of Sindh's location as a historical nexus between South Asia and the Middle East. In contrast to the expectations of modesty and de-emphasis on the self in many Muslim women's autobiographical narratives in the colonial era, Rizvia fashioned a pious, yet unapologetically self-promotional, autobiographical persona. In conversation with recent scholarship on Muslim cosmopolitanism, women's autobiographical writing, and travel literature, this article points to the development of an influential project of Muslim cosmopolitanism in late colonial Sindh that blurred the lines between British imperialism, pan-Islamic ambitions, and nationalism during the closing days of World War II.

AbstractFor the history connecting East Asia with the West, there is much literature about contact and trade across the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.1 This paper notes the rapid growth of the Pacific Ocean in linking Asia with the larger world in the early twentieth century by perceiving the economic relationships between Taiwan and Hong Kong while Japan colonized Taiwan. The Pacific route from Taiwan directly to America or through Japan largely replaced the Hong Kong–Atlantic–Europe–USA route to move Taiwan's export products to countries in the West. Other than still using Hong Kong as a trans-shipping point to connect with the world, Japan utilized Taiwan as a trans-shipping point to sell Japanese products to South China, and Taiwan's tea was sold directly to Southeast Asia rather than going through Hong Kong. Taiwan's exports to Japan took the place of its exports to China. Japanese and American goods dominated over European goods or Chinese goods from Hong Kong for Taiwan's import. Japanese and Taiwanese merchants (including some anti-Japanese merchants) overrode the British and Chinese merchants in Hong Kong to carry on the Taiwan–Hong Kong trade. America's westward expansion towards the Pacific, the rise of the Pacific shipping marked by the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, and the rise of Japan relative to China, restructured intra-Asian relations and those between Asia and the rest of the world.

Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualizing different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post)colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodization and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial.

Analysis of policy after 1945 has been profoundly shaped by the idea of a post-war settlement, which is increasingly viewed as inherently inflationary. For much of the period 1951–64, British economic policy was centrally focused on reducing inflation. The extension of sterling's convertibility in the mid-1950s forced British policy-makers to be sensitive to overseas perceptions of British policy and performance. At the beginning of the Conservative government's period in office, monetary policy was believed to be the most effective instrument to control inflation, but its limitations slowly became apparent and created enormous tension between the Treasury and Bank of England. In the literature stimulated by the Phillips curve, the formation of price expectations is the central element in inflationary dynamics, and it is argued that after 1955 Conservative policy was driven by the need to find alternatives to monetary policy to prevent and then limit inflationary expectations. A number of these initiatives – a steep rise in unemployment and confrontation in pay bargaining – sit uncomfortably with the idea of the post-war settlement and an alternative perspective on the Conservative years, emphasizing the Radcliffe committee and the investigations into incomes policy, is proposed.

ABSTRACT:This article examines the impact of post-war urban renewal on industry and economic activity in Manchester and Leeds. It demonstrates that local redevelopment plans contained important economic underpinnings which have been largely overlooked in the literature, and particularly highlights expansive plans for industrial reorganization and relocation. The article also shows that, in practice, urban renewal had a destabilizing and destructive impact on established industrial activities and exacerbated the inner-city problems of unemployment and disinvestment which preoccupied policy-makers by the 1970s. The article argues that post-war planning practices need to be integrated into wider histories of deindustrialization in British cities.

<div><p><em>The connection of Southern Cameroons to the Nigerian Federation by Britain after the First World War, worked to the disadvantage of Southern Cameroons’ sovereignty and political ambitions. With her international status as a Trust Territory, Southern Cameroons was marginalized by the colonial administration which failed to recognize her as a separate territory within the Nigerian Federation. Under such dispensation, Southern Cameroonians felt that for such a Nigerian connection to be of any benefit to the territory, it should be granted an autonomous regional status in line with the existing regions in Nigeria. This strain of relations caused Cameroonians to animate Nigeria political scene with series of events which became very instrumental in influencing the direction and nature of the evolution of the Nigerian federation. This feud for regional autonomy which dominated Nigerian politics was undertaken by pressures groups, political parties, and at individual levels through vocal voices, petitions, conferences and walkouts which expressed their grievances. The paper argues that the granting of quasi and full regional status in 1954 and 1959 respectively to Southern Cameroons was a consequence of their demonstrations. On this score Nigeria rose from three to four regions under colonial rule. From this paradigm we conclude that the history of the evolution of Nigerian federation can never be complete without the Southern Cameroons factor. Archival data and analyses of existing literature have provided evidence for this conclusion.</em></p></div>

AbstractNon-Germans—particularly “displaced persons”—were routinely blamed for crime in occupied western Germany. The Allied and German fixation on foreign gangs, violent criminals, and organized crime syndicates is well documented in contemporary reports, observations, and the press. An abundance of such data has long shaped provocative historical narratives of foreign-perpetrated criminality ranging from extensive disorder through to near uncontrolled anarchy. Such accounts complement assertions of a broader and more generalized crime wave. Over the last 30 years, however, a literature has emerged that casts doubt on the actual extent of lawlessness during the occupation of the west and, in turn, on the level non-German participation in crime. It may be that extensive reporting of non-German criminality at the time reflected the preexisting bigotries of Germans and the Allies, which when combined with anxieties about social and societal integrity became focused on the most marginalized groups in postwar society. This process of “group criminalization” is common and can have different motivations. Regardless of its cause, it was clearly evident in postwar western Germany and we hypothesized that it should have created harsher outcomes for non-German versus German criminal defendants when facing the Allied criminal justice system, such as greater rates of conviction and harsher punishments. This hypothesis was tested using newly collected military government court data from 1945 to 1946. Contrary to expectations, we found a more subtle bias against non-Germans than expected, which we argue reveals important characteristics about the US and British military government criminal justice system.

Despite the seeming abundance of writings on the topic, the depth and breadth of the British raw materials trade with Africa is yet to be fully appreciated. There are commodities, such as cassava starch, animal and dairy products and other less prominent crops, whose exploitation under colonial rule has not been studied; and, with regard to the organization of the export trade, the relationship between the colonial state and metropolitan (industrial and merchant) capital has not been adequately defined. This paper examines the organization of the production and export of hides and skins in colonial Northern Nigeria both to fill a gap in the literature on colonial economic history and to raise questions about the true position of the colonial state vis-à-vis metropolitan capital. Relying on primary source materials, it confirms the importance of hides and skins as a commodity of the pre-colonial caravan trade; and shows that, upon the establishment of British rule over Northern Nigeria, the volume of production and export increased, reaching new and unprecedented peaks during the world wars. Colonialism had a tremendous impact on the hides and skins industry of Northern Nigeria. The colonial state forced the producers to adopt new procedures in flaying, trimming and drying hides and skins, and extended rules of control of markets, minimum standards and compulsory inspection to the industry. In the enforcement of these rules, the state practised double standards, treating African producers and European merchant companies differently. Finally, on the strength of the evidence from the controversy over export duties and railway freight charges, the paper agrees that European merchants and industrialists had unlimited access to, and sometimes prevailed on, the colonial state; but argues that the latter had autonomy in the taking of crucial decisions affecting the economy and commerce of the colony.

AbstractThis article sheds light on the way Italian Zionism addressed the so-called “Arab problem” in British Palestine and later in Israel in the years following the Second World War, when a small—yet proportionally relevant—migration took place after an extremely lively revival of Zionist life and activities in Italy. In particular, four different approaches towards the “Arab problem” are presented, i.e. its dismissal, its under-estimation, the formulation of naïve proposals to solve it, the recognition of an inevitable confrontation. These approaches clearly recall the way in which the Zionist movement had already addressed the “Arab problem,” specifically in the decades before and after the First World War. The article also presents what can be considered an alternative discourse to these approaches, carried out by a few individuals who proposed different solutions to the “Arab problem” based on co-existence and cooperation.

ABSTRACTWhy has voter turnout declined in democracies all over the world? This article draws on findings from microlevel studies and theorizes two explanations: generational change and a rise in the number of elective institutions. The empirical section tests these hypotheses along with other explanations proposed in the literature—shifts in party/candidate competition, voting-age reform, weakening group mobilization, income inequality, and economic globalization. The authors conduct two analyses. The first analysis employs an original data set covering all post-1945 democratic national elections. The second studies individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and British, Canadian, and US national election studies. The results strongly support the generational change and elective institutions hypotheses, which account for most of the decline in voter turnout. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy and the challenges it faces.

The article is devoted to the Bleiburg myth in the politics of memory in modern Croatia. In mid-May 1945 the contingents which were trying to move to the West and avoid the possible reprisals against them by the victorious communists were transferred to the Yugoslav partisans by the British military administration. Among them prevailed the members of Croatian Ustasha and Slovene Home Guard, but there were also representatives of other nationalities of Yugoslavia. Soon after the war all the victims of the massacres that took place in 1945 and those who died from hunger and illness during the transfer were Croatized through the efforts of the Croatian emigration. After the collapse of Yugoslavia and during the war (1991–1995), the Bleiburg myth began to acquire official status. The return of Ustasha soldiers as heroes to the public sphere under F. Tudjman was due to the concept of «national reconciliation», which was carried out not through awareness of guilt and acceptance of responsibility for the crimes committed, but through their full or partial justification.The first part of the article reviews the research literature on the Bleiburg myth, the stages of its formation and functional significance. The second part examines the public debate around the Sarajevo mass for the murdered and other commemorative events in the anniversary in May 2020. They are compared with the evaluations of the Bleiburg narrative-ritual complex expressed in the literature.The 75th anniversary of Bleiburg commemorated in an atmosphere of fatigue from the restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic and on the eve of the Croatian parliamentary elections, demonstrated deep social division, the contested character of history and the political interest in discussing this tragedy. Comparison of the research literature with publications in the mass press indicates the obviousness of the functional model of the Bleiburg myth for a significant segment of Croatian society. Although the demand for renewal of the memorial repertoire seems to have increased, it is still not enough for the transition to the new politics of memory.

This important new addition to the growing body of literature onnationalism, religion, and religious nationalism is the product of aconference on "Religion and Nationalism in Europe and Asia", held in1995 at the University of Amsterdam. Princeton University Press is in general hesitant when it comes to publishing edited volumes; it has donewell to make an exception for this one. While many edited collections,particularly those that grow out of conferences, are at best of inconsistentquality and at worst entirely lacking in coherence, van der Veer andLehmann's Nation and Religion is striking both for the high quality of eachindividual essay it contains and for the depth and force of the overallargument that emerges from the volume as a whole.That argument is an important and provocative one: that modernity,contrary both to modernity's own depiction of itself and to much historiographyof the modem period, is not characterized by the eradication ofreligion's relevance to politics. On the contrary, the varied chapters in thisbook show religion to be a near-ubiquitous feature of the politicallandscape and discourse of the so-called "First" and "Third" Worlds alike.The volume is made up of ten chapters that together deal with therelationship between religion and politics in the Netherlands, Great Britain,India, and Japan. The fullest coverage is given to India, which isapproached from different perspectives in four different chapters: van derVeer's "The Mod State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britainand British India", Susan Bayly's "Race in Britain and India", ParthaChatterjee's "On Religious and Linguistic Nationalisms: The SecondPartition of Bengal", and Barbara Metcalf's "Nationalism, Modernity, andMuslim Identity in India before 1947". This particular focus on India is areflection both of van der Veer's own specific interests and training and ofthe fact that India - both British imperial and modem national - lends itselfparticularly well to analysis concerned with the interplay between religion,politics, and modem nationalisms.The British dimension of van der Veer and Bayly's chapters is expandedby Hugh McLeod in his contribution on "Protestantism and BritishNational Identity, 1815-1945". The volume also includes two chapters onthe Netherlands (Peter van Rooden's "History, the Nation, and Religion:The Transformations of the Dutch Religious Past", and Frans Groot's"Papists and Beggars: National Festivals and Nation Building in theNetherlands during the Nineteenth Century") and one on Japan (HarryHarmtunian's "Memory, Mouming, and National Morality: YasukuniShrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Postwar Japan").Despite the diversity of time and place reflected in the volume, the essaysread remarkably well together as a whole - the result of a clearly-conceivedand carefully edited project. Additional coherence comes from the ...

This article looks at the changing significations of the word “fascist” within communist discourses in Iraq and in Israel. I do so in order to illustrate how fascism, a concept signifying a political theory conceptualized and practiced in Italy, Germany, and Spain, became a boarder frame of reference to many leftist intellectuals in the Middle East. The articles shows that communist discourses formulated in Iraq during the years 1941-1945 evoked the word “fascist” not only in order to discredit Germany and Italy but also, and more importantly, as a way of critiquing Iraq’s radical pan-Arab nationalists and Iraq’s conservative elites who proclaimed their loyalty to pan-Arabism as well. In other words, the article studies the ways in which Iraqi communist intellectuals, most notably the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, Fahd, shifted the antifascist global battle to the Iraqi field and used the prodemocratic agenda of the Allies to criticize the absence of social justice and human rights in Iraq, and the Iraqi leadership’s submissive posture toward Britain. As it became clear to Iraqi communists that World War II was nearing its end, and that Iraq would be an important part of the American-British front, criticism of the Iraqi Premier Nūrī al-Saʿīd and his policies grew sharper, and such policies were increasingly identified as “fascist”. Within this context, Fahd equated chauvinist rightwing Iraqi nationalism in its anti-Jewish and anti- Kurdish manifestations with fascism and Nazi racism. I then look at the ways in which Iraqi Jewish communists internalized the party’s localized antifascist agenda. I argue that Iraqi Jewish communists identified rightwing Iraqi nationalism (especially the agenda espoused by a radical pan-Arab Party called al-Istiqlāl) as symptomatic of a fascist ideology. Finally, I demonstrate how Iraqi Jewish communists who migrated to Israel in the years 1950-1951 continued using the word “fascist” in their campaigns against rightwing Jewish nationalism and how this antifascist discourse influenced prominent Palestinian intellectuals

Michele Stephen; Desire, divine and demonic; Balinese mysticism in the paintings of I Ketut Budiana and I Gusti Nyoman Mirdiana (Andrea Acri) John Lynch (ed.); Issues in Austronesian historical phonology (Alexander Adelaar) Alfred W. McCoy; The politics of heroin; CIA complicity in the global drug trade (Greg Bankoff) Anthony Reid; An Indonesian frontier; Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (Timothy P. Barnard) John G. Butcher; The closing of the frontier; A history of the maritime fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 1850-2000 (Peter Boomgaard) Francis Loh Kok Wah, Joakim Öjendal (eds); Southeast Asian responses to globalization; Restructuring governance and deepening democracy (Alexander Claver) I Wayan Arka; Balinese morpho-syntax: a lexical-functional approach (Adrian Clynes) Zaharani Ahmad; The phonology-morphology interface in Malay; An optimality theoretic account (Abigail C. Cohn) Michael C. Ewing; Grammar and inference in conversation; Identifying clause structure in spoken Javanese (Aone van Engelenhoven) Helen Creese; Women of the kakawin world; Marriage and sexuality in the Indic courts of Java and Bali (Amrit Gomperts) Ming Govaars; Dutch colonial education; The Chinese experience in Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Kees Groeneboer) Ernst van Veen, Leonard Blussé (eds); Rivalry and conflict; European traders and Asian trading networks in the 16th and 17th centuries (Hans Hägerdal) Holger Jebens; Pathways to heaven; Contesting mainline and fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea (Menno Hekker) Ota Atsushi; Changes of regime and social dynamics in West Java; Society, state and the outer world of Banten, 1750-1830 (Mason C. Hoadley) Richard McMillan; The British occupation of Indonesia 1945-1946; Britain, the Netherlands and the Indonesian Revolution (Russell Jones) H.Th. Bussemaker; Bersiap! Opstand in het paradijs; De Bersiapperiode op Java en Sumatra 1945-1946 (Russell Jones) Michael Heppell; Limbang anak Melaka and Enyan anak Usen, Iban art; Sexual selection and severed heads: weaving, sculpture, tattooing and other arts of the Iban of Borneo (Viktor T. King) John Roosa; Pretext for mass murder; The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s coup d’état in Indonesia (Gerry van Klinken) Vladimir Braginsky; The heritage of traditional Malay literature; A historical survey of genres, writings and literary views (Dick van der Meij) Joel Robbins, Holly Wardlow (eds); The making of global and local modernities in Melanesia; Humiliation, transformation and the nature of cultural change (Toon van Meijl) Kwee Hui Kian; The political economy of Java’s northeast coast c. 1740-1800; Elite synergy (Luc Nagtegaal) Charles A. Coppel (ed.); Violent conflicts in Indonesia; Analysis, representation, resolution (Gerben Nooteboom) Tom Therik; Wehali: the female land; Traditions of a Timorese ritual centre (Dianne van Oosterhout) Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso; State and society in the Philippines (Portia L. Reyes) Han ten Brummelhuis; King of the waters; Homan van der Heide and the origin of modern irrigation in Siam (Jeroen Rikkerink) Hotze Lont; Juggling money; Financial self-help organizations and social security in Yogyakarta (Dirk Steinwand) Henk Maier; We are playing relatives; A survey of Malay writing (Maya Sutedja-Liem) Hjorleifur Jonsson; Mien relations; Mountain people and state control in Thailand (Nicholas Tapp) Lee Hock Guan (ed.); Civil society in Southeast Asia (Bryan S. Turner) Jan Mrázek; Phenomenology of a puppet theatre; Contemplations on the art of Javanese wayang kulit (Sarah Weiss) Janet Steele; Wars within; The story of Tempo, an independent magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia (Robert Wessing) REVIEW ESSAY Sean Turnell; Burma today Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Robert Taylor, Tin Maung Maung Than (eds); Myanmar; Beyond politics to societal imperatives Monique Skidmore (ed.); Burma at the turn of the 21st century Mya Than; Myanmar in ASEAN In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde no. 163 (2007) no: 1, Leiden

Drawing on the Kuhnian model of scientific paradigms, this article suggests consensus politics should be conceptualised not as an agreement or a settlement but as a political framework that derives from an ideationally informed policy paradigm. Such a consensus constrains the autonomy of governing elites, encouraging them to conform to an established policy agenda that defines the ‘mainstream’ wherein ‘the possible is the art of politics’. In Britain, as demonstrated by the replacement of a post-war social democratic paradigm by a contemporary neo-liberal successor, periods of policy continuity and incremental reform have been matched by occasions of dramatic political change. Any appreciation of consensus politics has therefore to explain change as well as account for stability, something considerably under emphasised in the existing literature. Consensus politics are therefore best defined as a constrained space within which politics is conducted and political actors differ, a paradigmatic framework from which political outcomes emerge, and never as an agreement freely entered into. Looking at consensus politics beyond the much commented upon post-war example, this article uses British politics since 1945 as an exemplar of consensus politics and an illustration of how a consensus can be forged, how it can endure and how it may change.

This article outlines the environmental disaster that was phosphate mining on Banaba – or Ocean Island, as it was known to outsiders. The article tracks the tactics used by what became the BPC (British Phosphate Commissioners) in extracting phosphate from the island, resulting in the removal of 90 per cent of its soil and simultaneously alienating Banabans from their land, livelihoods and culture. This process took place over 80 years, finally ending in 1981. In the course of this extraction, Banabans were removed from what was fast becoming an uninhabitable environment in 1945, when they began life on the Fijian island of Rabi. This article reflects on the ongoing legacy of bitterness and grief experienced by Banabans, together with their attempts at obtaining restitution from the Company and the governments it represented. In this context, the art installation Project Banaba (2017; 2019) by Katerina Teaiwa is considered as a response to these histories. The article concludes with an examination of the literature that considers the removal of Banabans as a test case for climate-induced migration, noting that the singularity of the Banaban experience is not likely to be repeated, while also acknowledging the ongoing legacy of loss and grief for Banabans.

A different name than English literature, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, was given to the body of literature in English that emerged on account of the British interaction with India unlike the case with their interaction with America or Australia or New Zealand. Even the Indians’ contributions (translations as well as creative pieces in English) were classed under the caption ‘Anglo-Indian’ initially but later a different name, ‘Indo-Anglian’, was conceived for the growing variety and volume of writings in English by the Indians. However, unlike the former the latter has not found a favour with the compilers of English dictionaries. With the passage of time the fine line of demarcation drawn on the basis of subject matter and author’s point of view has disappeared and currently even Anglo-Indians’ writings are classed as ‘Indo-Anglian’. Besides contemplating on various connotations of the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ the article discusses the related issues such as: the etymology of the term, fixing the name of its coiner and the date of its first use. In contrast to the opinions of the historians and critics like K R S Iyengar, G P Sarma, M K Naik, Daniela Rogobete, Sachidananda Mohanty, Dilip Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak it has been brought to light that the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ was first used in 1880 by James Payn to refer to the Indians’ writings in English rather pejoratively. However, Iyengar used it in a positive sense though he himself gave it up soon. The reasons for the wide acceptance of the term, sometimes also for the authors of the sub-continent, by the members of academia all over the world, despite its rejection by Sahitya Akademi (the national body of letters in India), have also been contemplated on. References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. (1970). 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The Moving Finger. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Boria, Cavellay. (1807). “Account of the Jains, Collected from a Priest of this Sect; at Mudgeri: Translated by Cavelly Boria, Brahmen; for Major C. Mackenzie”. Asiatick Researches: Or Transactions of the Society; Instituted In Bengal, For Enquiring Into The History And Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 9, 244-286. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.104510 Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary [The]. (1971). Bombay et al: Allied Publishers. Print. Chatterjee, Dilip Kumar. (1989). Cousins and Sri Aurobindo: A Study in Literary Influence, Journal of South Asian Literature, 24(1), 114-123. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40873985. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. (1988). A Study of the Works of James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan. PDF. 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New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Encarta World English Dictionary. (1999). London: Bloomsbury. Gandhi, M K. (1938 [1909]). Hind Swaraj Tr. M K Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Gokak, V K. (n.d.). English in India: Its Present and Future. Bombay et al: Asia Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460832 Goodwin, Gwendoline (Ed.). (1927). Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176578 Guptara, Prabhu S. (1986). Review of Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: A Guide to Information Sources. The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 311–13. PDF. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507834 Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. (1945). Indian Contribution to English Literature [The]. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/ indiancontributi030041mbp ---. (2013 [1962]). Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling. ---. (1943). Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay: PEN & International Book House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/IndoAnglianLiterature Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (2003). Essex: Pearson. Lyall, Alfred Comyn. (1915). The Anglo-Indian Novelist. Studies in Literature and History. London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.94619 Macaulay T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education dated the 2nd February 1835. HTML. Retrieved from: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2003). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. ---. (2003[1992]). The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford U P. Minocherhomji, Roshan Nadirsha. (1945). Indian Writers of Fiction in English. Bombay: U of Bombay. Modak, Cyril (Editor). (1938). The Indian Gateway to Poetry (Poetry in English), Calcutta: Longmans, Green. PDF. Retrieved from http://en.booksee.org/book/2266726 Mohanty, Sachidananda. (2013). “An ‘Indo-Anglian’ Legacy”. The Hindu. July 20, 2013. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article 4927193.ece Mukherjee, Sujit. (1968). Indo-English Literature: An Essay in Definition, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur and S. K. Desai. Dharwad: Karnatak University. Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt.New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles [The], (1993). Ed. Lesley Brown, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt. Oaten, Edward Farley. (1953 [1916]). Anglo-Indian Literature. In: Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 14, (pp. 331-342). A C Award and A R Waller, (Eds). Rpt. ---. (1908). A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature, London: Kegan Paul. PDF. Retrieved from: https://ia600303.us.archive.org/0/items/sketchofangloind00oateuoft/sketchofangloind00oateuoft.pdf) Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (1979 [1974]). A. S. Hornby (Ed). : Oxford UP, 3rd ed. Oxford English Dictionary [The]. Vol. 7. (1991[1989]). J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Pai, Sajith. (2018). Indo-Anglians: The newest and fastest-growing caste in India. Web. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/magazine/867130/indo-anglians-the-newest-and-fastest-growing-caste-in-india Pandia, Mahendra Navansuklal. (1950). The Indo-Anglian Novels as a Social Document. Bombay: U Press. Payn, James. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 246(1791):370-375. PDF. 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(Eds.) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 – 1997. London: Vintage. Sampson, George. (1959 [1941]). Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [The]. Cambridge: UP. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.18336. Sarma, Gobinda Prasad. (1990). Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Singh, Kh. Kunjo. (2002). The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2012). How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sturgeon, Mary C. (1916). Studies of Contemporary Poets, London: George G Hard & Co., Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95728. Thomson, W S (Ed). (1876). Anglo-Indian Prize Poems, Native and English Writers, In: Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to India. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., Retrieved from https://books.google.co.in/ books?id=QrwOAAAAQAAJ Wadia, A R. (1954). The Future of English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wadia, B J. (1945). Foreword to K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/indiancontributi030041mbp Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. (1989). New York: Portland House. Yule, H. and A C Burnell. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. W. Crooke, Ed. London: J. Murray. 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Few issues have created more tensions and uneasiness in international affairs than the idea of a nuclear armed Germany. The militarist and expansionist tradition of Germany has induced in its neighbors an underlying fear of a possible revival of her past hehavior. The apparition of nuclear weapons in the international System after 1945, and the subsequent accession of Great Britain and France to the status of nuclear powers, has added a further dimension to the German problem. During the Cold War, the issue of German nuclear weapons was rarely discussed favorably, particularly in Europe. The case was different in the United States where Germany's role in the nuclear strategy of NATO was approached with a detachment seldom found in British or Trench political literature. The demise of the East-West confrontation and the unification of Germany have encouraged many American scholars, often associated with the neorealist school, to push for the end of Germany's singularisation in the nuclear field. For them, a nuclear armed Germany, if not inevitable, could well become a source of military stability in the region. Although most of them base their arguments on the merits of selective nuclear proliferation, they adopt similarly an olympian perspective towards Germany which is markedly different from what is found in European literature. Their position of course does not reflect Washington's official view on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This paper tries to circumscribe their line of thought and argues that it closely parallels, to a certain degree, the broader American attitude towards Germany seen as an equal and reliable ally in the evolving European security context.

James Loughlin, The Ulster Question since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 151 pp., £10.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–60616–7.David Harkness, Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Divided Island (London: Macmillan, 1996), 190 pp., £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–56796–X.Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 347 pp., £12.99 (pb), £40.00 (hb), ISBN 0–333–73162–X.Brian A. Follis, A State Under Siege. The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 250 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–198–20305–5.Dermot Keogh and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Northern Ireland and the Politics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–521–44430–6.William Crotty and David Schmitt, eds., Ireland and the Politics of Change (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 264 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–32894–2.David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland. Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 344 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–30287–0.Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney, Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Identity in Northern Ireland (Washington: Smithonian Institution Press, 1996), 270 pp., £34.75 (hb), ISBN 1–560–98520–8.John D. Brewer, with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: the mote and the beam (London: Macmillan, 1998), 248 pp., £16.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–74635–X.During the last three decades, and accompanying the ‘troubles’, the literature on Northern Ireland has mushroomed. Within the last ten years two surveys have attempted to summarise and categorise the major interpretations. John Whyte's Interpreting Northern Ireland covered the 1970s and 1980s and came to the conclusion that traditional Unionist and nationalist interpretations, with their emphasis on external, that is British and Irish, forces as the cause for the problem, had begun to lose out to ‘internal conflict’ interpretations. He felt, however, that this approach, too, was coming to the end of its usefulness, and he expected the emergence of a new paradigm shortly.

Jesper Jakobsen anmelder: Robert Darnton: Censors at Work. How States Shaped Literature. The British Library 2014. 316 s., ill., indb. ISBN 978-0-7123-5761-6 Karl Christian Lammers anmelder: Samarbejdets mand. Minister Gunnar Larsen. Dagbog 1941-1943, udgivet af John T. Lauridsen og Joachim Lund. Det Kongelige Bibliotek & Selskabet til Udgivelse af Kilder til Danmarks Historie i samarbejde med Historika 2015, I-III, i alt 1.486 sider.

In 1934, construction began on training centers for the upper echelons of future NS leadership: the Vogelsang in the Eifel, Krössinsee (Polish Złocieniec-Budowo) in western Pomerania, and Sonthofen in Allgäu. Through the enormous efforts of the German Labor Front (DAF) the training centres, called Ordensburgen (literally: ‘castles of the orders’), were completed in 1936. In the meantime, much literature has been published on all of the NS Ordenburgen, yet an investigation of the genesis and analysis of their form is still lacking, which this essay partially attempts to address. The intention was undoubtedly to build Ordensburgen on the southern, western and eastern fringes of the Reich distanced less than 60 kilometres from the border. Rosenberg, who had made a statement to this effect in a speech in 1934, coined the name ‘Ordensburg’ in connection with the Teutonic Order – the proud champion of ‘Germanness’. The name evoked other echoes from history: young men who were trained for warfare and administration and who lived a life closed of from outside influences. The name also recalled the medieval orders of knights who exercised their power as a military authority along the frontiers of Christianity from Spain to Palestine. If we go beyond a formal interpretation of the Ordensburgen, what can be seen in all the three structures is the important symbolic function of towers (two rectangular brick towers were erected in Kroessinsee in 1939). In all of them so-called Tingplätze were built, a kind of open-air theatre for political rallies. Moreover, the architect Clemens Klotz embraced the modern age. In adhering to contemporary thought, he blended the cosiness of the Heimatstil with the monumentality and pathos of Neoclassicism. Other forms are also found, such as oval risalites derived from ‘Neues Bauen’ or the protruding window reveal, or the use of unworked stone blocks, something that was particularly characteristic of NS architecture. Yet despite the name ’Ordensburg’, formal references to medieval architecture are sparse. The most apparent examples are seen in the Sonthofen architecture of Herman Giesler in the proportions of the main tower or the vaulted ceilings of the tavern (the so-called Fuchsbau). After 1945, the Ordensburgen became the military barracks of the victors: Vogelsang was British until 1950, then Belgian; Sonthofen was American until 1956 and then turned over to the German Bundeswehr; Krössinsee was used by the Soviet army from 1947 or 1948, and afterward became the Polish Budowo. Vogelsang was opened to the public in 2006. Today, we face ongoing questions about the preservation and new uses of the Ordensburg structures and facilities. The designation of the former NS training centres as memorial sites, in which the juncture between Ordensburgen and the NS crimes finds physical expression, will presumably be the sole way to ensure their continued existence. Between 1939 and 1940, approximately 260 Ordensjunkers (the name derived from ‘Junker’: a nobleman from the landed class) were sent from Krössinsee on military assignment to the area of Poznań (‘Warthegau’), from where up to a half a million Poles and Jews were expelled to the Government General. Further documentation shows the involvement of the Ordensjunkers in the Holocaust during 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories. In making the buildings of the Ordensburgen accessible to the public, while at the same time laying bare the reality behind the mystique, it seems necessary to proceed on a different path than that which has been taken up to now. ‘Domesticating’ the testimonies of a terror regime has been expressed in ways such as the oversized colourful pillows for visitor seating at the Wewelsburg Castle or the garish plastic forms in Vogelsang. Tus, in addition to taking stock of the buildings and making a case for their preservation, the serious question that must be asked is how to deal with this kind of legacy. (translated by Sharon Nemeth)

Alma Karlin (1889–1950), a round-the-world traveller, intellectual, and writer from Celje, Slovenia, arrived in Japan and lived in Tokyo in the early 1920s, an era which historians consider to be an interim period between the initial expansion of the Japanese Empire to mainland Asia and its end in 1945. The writer’s fascination with the land can be inferred, among other things, from a 35-page description of Japan and the Japanese in her most famous book, Einsame Weltreise. Die Tragödie einer Frau (The Odyssey of a Lonely Woman), and passages in Reiseskizzen (Travel Sketches), an earlier work. The article aims to place these travel accounts in the historical and ideological contexts of their time while highlighting some similarities and differences between the representations of the land and its people by Karlin and those by Isabella Bird (1831–1904). Although Karlin makes no explicit reference to the famous British traveller in her writing on Japan, the article demonstrates that she must have known about Bird’s book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. It is, above all, her decision to introduce her (German) readers to topoi that were typical of Victorian women’s travel writing which suggests that Karlin partly based her image of Japan, if not even the itinerary of her journey there, on Bird’s bestselling work. Nevertheless, Karlin does not seem to have conformed to the then dominant orientalist discourses on Japan, her representations generally showing none of the Western arrogance that was so typical of her fellow travellers of both sexes.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others as responsible for the famines.

If, as Peter Gatrell has suggested, the figure of the refugee was defined and even constructed during the twentieth century, then the Second World War was a crucial period in this process (Gatrell, 2013). This article looks at three representations of refugee figures from this period, Graham Greene's novel The Name of Action (1930), Rebecca West's short story ‘Around Us the Wail of Sirens’ (1941) and Storm Jameson's novel The Black Laurel (1947), evaluating them in light of recent scholarship around hospitality and asylum to suggest that these refugee characters subvert the norms and customs of British hospitality. It argues that in these three texts, refugees act as ‘threshold figures’, exposing the realities of war and the inadequacy of British social processes to contain them. In doing so, they point towards a different way of representing the refugee as an active agent, rather than a passive recipient in both political processes and social interactions.