Academic literature on the topic 'WWII Pacific War'

Abstract This Article analyzes whether the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, the only multilateral international agreement that draws borders in East Asia, resolves the longstanding dispute over Dokdo between Korea and Japan. It uses the dispute to draw larger lessons about the nature of the treaty that ended World War II in the Pacific and how it structured the peace in Asia differently from that in Europe. It uses U.S. archival material to reconstruct the history of the making of the Treaty, which continues to be the most significant international legal instrument governing post-WWII Asia. Although the Republic of Korea demonstrated a long history of control over Dokdo, Japan annexed the island on February 22, 1905. Japan places much importance on the Treaty’s silence because the Treaty otherwise required Japan to relinquish the territories it acquired before and during World War II. After the fall of the Nationalist government in China, the United States decided to rebuild Japan into a strong regional ally, and consequently negotiated a generous peace treaty with its former WWII enemy. This Article concludes that the Treaty left Dokdo, along with other important issues, open for future resolution.

This article focuses on the underwater cultural heritage (UCH) located across the Pacific Ocean by sampling three temporal themes: living heritage and traditional indigenous cultural heritage, the global connections of the Manila Galleon trade, and the modern warfare of World War II (WWII). Many of the traditional cultural practices (living heritage) and tangible cultural heritage related to indigenous people of the Pacific are coastal and sea related. Their world encompasses the sea, which was not seen as a barrier as but a much-used connection to people occupying the thousands of islands. The Pacific contains an extensive maritime cultural heritage, including UCH, which reflects the cultural identity of people living in the region. From the 16th to 18th centuries, the Spanish Empire prospered through an elaborate Asia-Pacific trade network. The Manila Galleon trade between Manila, Philippines, and Acapulco, Mexico, connected into the existing Atlantic trade transporting commodities such as porcelain, silver, spices and textiles from Asia to the Americas and Spain. Of the 400 known voyages between 1565 and 1815, approximately 59 shipwrecks occurred, of which only a handful of galleons have been investigated. The scale of WWII heritage in the Pacific region reflects the intensity and impacts of global conflicts fought across the world’s largest ocean. Associated UCH includes near shore defensive infrastructure, landing and amphibious assault craft, submerged aircraft, and a wide range of ships and submarines, auxiliary, combatant and non-military casualties alike. Twentieth century warfare involved massive losses of material. The legacy of submerged battlefields in the Pacific is complex. Interest is high in the discovery of naval UCH, but critical aspects are often intertwined. Archaeology, history, reuse, memorialisation (gravesites), tourism, unexploded ordnance, environmental threat (fuel oil), ownership and salvage all shape what we can learn from this resource.

Could colonial settlers who repatriated from colonies to metropole after the empire’s fall be considered ‘diaspora’? How do these migrants of decolonization maintain their collective memory of the past and solidary identity as a group? This article explores the historical experiences of Okinawan colonial migrants to Japanese mandate Micronesia (which includes the Northern Marianas, Palau, and Chuuk) and these migrants’ forced repatriation to Okinawa after the devastating battles in the Western Pacific in 1944–45. It also ethnographically examines the Okinawan repatriates’ pilgrimages to the islands throughout the post-WWII years to visit their childhood homes and locations of their loved ones’ deaths. These Okinawan repatriates, who had been twice-displaced in their lifetimes and survived the brutal war, continue to visit the islands to reminisce about their childhood and pray for the loved ones who had died on the islands. This article argues that such migrants of decolonization could not only be considered a diasporic group but also a group who retain a strong sense of solidarity and collective memory. Further, this article claims that formal and informal ritualistic practices, such as those ethnographically portrayed in this essay, play a pivotal role in creating and recreating collective memory and identity among the migrants of decolonization as a diaspora.

This article deals with Taiwanese civilian emigration and overseas investment in the period of 1940–1945 when Japan engaged the Greater East Asian War. Taiwan in general, and some Taiwanese in particular, helped the reconstruction of Japanese occupied areas in this war. Overseas Taiwanese mainly worked as employees for Japanese stores, companies, mines, plantations, and Japanese government offices, but also opened stores, factories, plantations and banks by themselves. As overseas ethnic Chinese, the Taiwanese civilian emigrants examined in this paper moved in the direction opposite that of other overseas Chinese holding Chinese nationality. The Taiwanese populace expanded overseas to Greater East Asia, while Chinese nationals withdrew from this area and returned to China. Thus, this paper will illustrate how the phrase, “people should fight for their country,” bore different meanings for these two different types of overseas Chinese in the Asia-Pacific War theater of wwii. 1930至40年代，中日學者曾就華僑的定義進行討論。吳主惠將華僑定義為定居於海外的中國人及其後裔，不包括駐外政府官員和留學生。吳氏認為華僑的最嚴格定義，是指定居海外但仍保有中國國籍者。1933年日本大藏省為替局統計臺灣地區約有46,000至47,000名華僑，便是依據這樣的定義。吳氏指出，在此嚴格定義下，華人後裔如不具中國國籍者，便非華僑。另有一種較為寬鬆的定義是: 無論是否具中國國籍，凡定居或曾赴海外的中國人及其後裔皆為華僑，井出季和太即持此見。關於日本統治臺灣時期的臺灣人國籍，根據日本大藏省為替局的解釋，由於馬關條約簽訂後的二年內，臺灣人得自由決定離去與否，留下臺灣者為日本國民。這些成為日本國民的臺灣人或其祖先曾具有中國國民的身分，因而1933年的340萬臺灣人也被視為較寬定義下的華僑。在日本建構所謂的「大東亞共榮圈」時期 (1940–1945)，許多不具軍人身分的臺灣人向海外移民或投資，與之相反的是，擁有中國國籍的華僑在此時期則多回歸故里。在大東亞戰爭時期的華人，由於出身不同，「為國而戰」一詞對於他們的意義也因而分歧。 (This article is in English.)

Viktor Astafyev was an outstanding Russian writer and a representative of ”village prose”. In his oeuvre, along with works on the question of “man and nature”, we may find numerous important works concerning the subject of war. Astafyev fought in WWII, which left him with some unhealed wounds. In his novels about this 'Great Patriotic War', the dominating pacifist humanism triggered the first depiction of German soldiers through the prism of Christian mercy in Russian literature. The attempt to analyze the novel The Cursed and the Slain is very relevant in light of our present reality, full of news of new military conflicts, including that in eastern Ukraine.

In the summer of 1944, American Sergeant Paul Dorsey was hired by the Naval Aviation Photography Unit (NAPU) to capture “the Marines’ bitter struggle against their determined foe” in the Pacific islands (Philips 43). Dorsey had been a photographer and photojournalist before enlisting in the Marines, and was thus well placed to fulfil the NAPU’s remit of creating positive images of American forces in the Pacific. Under the editorial and professional guidance of Edward Steichen, NAPU photographers like Dorsey provided epic images of battle (especially from the air and sea), and also showed American forces at ease – sunbathing, swimming, drinking and relaxing together (Bachner At Ease; Bachner Men of WWII). Steichen – by now a lieutenant commander – oversaw the entire NAPU project by developing, choosing and editing the images, and also providing captions for their reproduction in popular newspapers and magazines such as LIFE. Under his guidance, selected NAPU images were displayed at the famous Power in the Pacific exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of the war, and distributed in the popular U.S. Navy War Photographs memorial book which sold over 6 million copies in 1945.While the original NAPU photographers (Steichen himself, Charles Kerlee, Horace Bristol, Wayne Miller, Charles Fenno Jacobs, Victor Jorgensen and Dwight Long) had been at work in the Pacific since the summer of 1942, Dorsey was hired specifically to document the advance of American Marines through the Marianas and Volcano Islands. In line with the NAPU’s remit, Dorsey provided a number of famous rear view shots of combat action on Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima. However, there are a number of his photographs that do not fit easily within that vision of war – images of wounded Marines and dead Japanese soldiers, as well as shots of abject Japanese POWs with their heads bowed and faces averted. It is this last group of enemy images that proves the most interesting, for not only do they trouble NAPU’s explicit propaganda framework, they also challenge our traditional assumption that photography is an inert form of representation.It is not hard to imagine that photographs of abject Japanese POWs reinforced feelings of triumph, conquest and justice that circulated in America’s post-war victory culture. Indeed, images of emaciated and incarcerated Japanese soldiers provided the perfect contrast to the hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, beefcake figures that populated the NAPU photographs and symbolized American power in the Pacific. However, once Japan was rehabilitated into a powerful American ally, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb was questioned once again in America’s Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s, it was no longer acceptable to feel triumphant in the face of Japanese abjection and suffering. Instead, these images helped foster a new kind of belated patriotism – and a new global disposition – in which Americans generated their own magnanimity by expressing pity, compassion and sympathy for victims of their previous foreign policy decisions (Lisle).While that patriotic interpretive framework tells us much about how dominant formations of American identity are secured by the production – especially the visual production – of enemy others, it cannot account for images or viewer interpretations that exceed, unwork, or disrupt war’s foundational logics of friend/enemy and perpetrator/victim. I focus on Dorsey because he offers one such ‘deviant’ image: This photograph was taken by Dorsey on Guam in July 1944, and its caption tells us that the Japanese prisoner “waits to be questioned by intelligence officers” (Philips 189). As the POW looks into Dorsey’s camera lens (and therefore at us, the viewers), he is subject to the collective gaze of the American marines situated behind him, and presumably others that lay out of the frame, behind Dorsey. What is fascinating about this particular image is the prisoner’s refusal to obey the trope of abjection so readily assumed by other Japanese POWs documented in the NAPU archive and in other popular war-time imagery. Indeed, when I first encountered this image I immediately framed the POW’s return gaze as defiant – a challenging, bold, and forceful reply to American aggression in the Pacific. The problem, of course, was that this resistant gaze soon became reductive; that is, by replicating war’s foundational logics of difference it effaced a number of other dispositions at work in the photograph. What I find compelling about the POW’s return gaze is its refusal to be contained within the available subject positions of either ‘abject POW’ or ‘defiant resistor’. Indeed, this unruliness is what keeps me coming back to Dorsey’s image, for it teaches us that photography itself always exceeds the conventional assumption that it is a static form of visual representation.Photography, Animation, MovementThe connections between movement, stillness and photography have two important starting points. The first, and more general, is Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectic image in which the past and the present come together “in a flash” and constitute what he calls “dialectics at a standstill” (N3.1; 463). Unlike Theodore Adorno, who lamented Benjamin’s Medusa-like tendency to turn the world to stone, I read Benjamin’s concept of standstill – of stillness in general – as something fizzing and pulsating with “political electricity” (Adorno 227-42; Buck-Morss 219). This is to deny our most basic assumption about photography: that it is an inert visual form that freezes and captures discrete moments in time and space. My central argument is that photography’s assumed stillness is always constituted by a number of potential and actual mobilities that continually suture and re-suture viewing subjects and images into one another.Developing Benjamin’s idea of a the past and present coming together “in a flash”, Roland Barthes provides the second starting point with his notion of the punctum of photography: “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (25). Conventional understandings of the punctum frame it as a static moment – so powerful that it freezes the viewer, stops them in their tracks, and captures their attention. My point is that the affective punch of the photograph is not a frozen moment at all; rather, the punctum – like the dialectic image – is fizzing with political electricity. Therefore, to suggest that a viewing subject is arrested in the moment of perception – that they are somehow captured by a photograph’s meaning – is to mistakenly understand the act of looking as a static behaviour.I want to use Dorsey’s image of the POW to push these theoretical starting points and explore the mobile dispositions that are generated when a viewing subject encounters a photograph. What most interests me about Dorsey’s photograph is the level of animation it produces. The POW’s return gaze is actually rather blank: it is unclear whether he is angry, weary, bored, insane or none of the above. But it is the viewing subject’s anxiety at such ambivalence – such unknowability – that provokes a powerful desire to name it. The visceral sensations and emotional responses provoked in viewers (are we taken aback? Do we sympathize with the POW? Are we equally blank?) very quickly become settled interpretations, for example, “his defiant gaze resists American power.” What I want to do is explore the pre-interpretive moment when images like Dorsey’s reach out and grab us – for it is in that moment that photography’s “political electricity” reveals itself most clearly.Production, Signification, InterpretationThe mobility inherent in the photograph has an important antecedent at the level of production. Since the Brownie camera was introduced in WWI, photographers have carried their mode of representation with them – in Dorsey’s case, his portable camera was carried with him as he travelled with the Marines through the Pacific (Philips 29). It is the photographer’s itinerary – his or her movement prior to clicking the camera’s shutter – that shapes and determines a photograph’s content. More to the point, the action of clicking the camera’s shutter is never an isolated moment; rather, it is punctured by all of the previous clicks and moments leading up to it – especially on a long photographic assignment like Dorsey’s – and contains within it all of the subsequent clicks and moments that potentially come after it. In this sense, the photographer’s click recalls Benjamin: it is a “charged force field of past and present” (Buck-Morss 219). That complicated temporality is also manifested in the photographer’s contact sheet (or, more recently, computer file) which operates as a visual travelogue of discrete moments that bleed into one another.The mobility inherent in photography extends itself into the level of signification; that is, the arrangements of signs depicted within the frame of each discrete image. Critic Gilberto Perez gives us a clue to this mobility in his comments about Eugène Atget’s famous ‘painterly’ photographs of Paris:A photograph begins with the mobility, or at least potential mobility, of the world’s materials, of the things reproduced from reality, and turns that into a still image. More readily than in a painting, we see things in a photograph, even statues, as being on the point of movement, for these things belong to the world of flux from which the image has been extracted (328).I agree that the origin point of a photograph is potential mobility, but that mobility is never completely vanquished when it is turned into a still image. For me, photographs – no matter what they depict – are always saturated with the “potential mobility of the world’s materials”, and in this sense they are never still. Indeed, the world of flux out of which the image is extracted includes the image itself, and in that sense, an image can never be isolated from the world it is derived from. If we follow Perez and characterize the world as one of flux, but then insist that the photograph can never be extracted from that world, it follows that the photograph, too, is characterized by fluctuation and change – in short, by mobility. The point, here, is to read a photograph counter intuitively – not as an arrest of movement or a freezing of time, but as a collection of signs that is always potentially mobile. This is what Roland Barthes was hinting at when he suggested that a photograph is “a mad image, chafed by reality”: any photograph is haunted by absence because the depicted object is no longer present, but it is also full of certainty that the depicted object did exist at a previous time and place (113-15). This is precisely Benjamin’s point as well, that “what has been comes together with the now” (N3.1; 463). Following on from Barthes and Benjamin, I want to argue that photographs don’t freeze a moment in time, but instead set in motion a continual journey between feelings of absence in the present (i.e. “it is not there”) and present imaginings of the past (i.e. “but it has indeed been”).As Barthes’ notion of the punctum reveals, the most powerful register at which photography’s inherent mobility operates is in the sensations, responses and feelings provoked in viewers. This is why we say that a photograph has the capacity to move us: the best images take us from one emotional state (e.g. passive, curious, bored) and carry us into another (e.g. shocked, sad, amused). It is this emotional terrain of our responses to photography that both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have explored in depth. Why are we moved by some images and not others? Are documentary or artistic photographs more likely to reach out and prick us? What is the most appropriate or ethical response to pictures of another’s suffering?Sontag suggests a different connection between photography and mobility in that it enables a particular touristification of the world; that is, cameras help “convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted to an item for aesthetic appreciation” (On Photography 110). While Sontag’s political economy of photography (with its Frankfurt School echo) continues to be explored by anthropologists and scholars in Tourism Studies, I want to argue that it offers a particularly reductive account of photography’s potential mobilities. While Sontag does address photography’s constitutive and rather complex relationship with reality, she still conceives of photographs themselves as static and inert representations. Indeed, what she wrestled with in On Photography was the “insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph”, and the photograph’s capacity to make reality “stand still” (111-12; 163). The problem with such a view is that it limits our account of interpretation; in short, it suggests that viewers either accept a photograph’s static message (and are thus moved), or reject it (and remain unmoved). But the moving, here, is the sole prerogative of the viewer: there is no sense in which the photograph and its contents are themselves mobile. I want to argue that the relationships established in the act of looking between viewing subjects and the objects contained within an image are much more complex and varied than Sontag’s framework suggests. Photography’s Affective MobilityTo reveal the mobilities underscoring photography’s affective punch, we must redistribute its more familiar power relations through W.J.T. Mitchell’s important question: what do pictures want? Such a question subverts our usual approach to photographs (i.e. what do we want from photographs?) by redeploying the privileged agency of the viewer into the image itself. In other words, it is the image that demands something of the viewer rather than the other way around. What it demands, of course, is a response. Certainly this is an emotional response, for even being bored by a photograph is a response of sorts. But an emotional response is also an affective response, which means that the punch carried by a photograph is as physical as it is metaphorical or visual. Indeed, it is precisely in the act of perception, where the emotional and the affective fuse, that photography’s assumed stillness is powerfully subverted.If Mitchell animates the picture by affording it some of the viewer’s agency, then Gilles Deleuze goes one step further by exploring what happens to agency in the act of perception. For Deleuze, a work of art – for our purposes, a photograph – is not an inert or still document, but rather a “block of sensations” (Deleuze; Deleuze & Guattari; Bogue). It is not a finished object produced by an autonomous artist or beheld in its entirety by an autonomous viewer; rather, it is a combination of precepts (initial perceptions) and affects (physical intensities) that passes through all subjects at the point of visual perception. This kind of relational encounter with an image not only deconstructs Modernity’s foundational distinction between the subject and the object, it also opens up an affective connection between all subjects engaged in the act of looking; in this case, the photographer, the subjects and objects within the photograph and the viewer.From Deleuze, we know that perception is characterized by common physical responses in all subjects: the movement of the optic nerve, the dilation of the pupil, the squint of the eyelid, the craning of the neck to see up close. However small, however imperceptible, these physical sensations are all still movements; indeed, they are movements repeated by all seeing subjects. My point is that these imperceptible modes of attention are consistently engaged in the act of viewing photographs. What this suggests is that taking account of the affective level of perception changes our traditional understandings of interpretation; indeed, even if a photograph fails to move us emotionally, it certainly moves us physically, though we may not be conscious of it.Drawing from Mitchell and Deleuze, then, we can say that a photograph’s “insolent, poignant stasis” makes no sense. A photograph is constantly animated not just by the potentials inherent in its enframed subjects and objects, but more importantly, in the acts of perception undertaken by viewers. Certainly some photographs move us emotionally – to tears, to laughter, to rage – and indeed, this emotional terrain is where Barthes and Sontag offer important insights. My point is that all photographs, no matter what they depict, move us physically through the act of perception. If we take Mitchell’s question seriously and extend agency to the photograph, then it is in the affective register that we can discern a more relational encounter between subjects and objects because both are in a constant state of mobility.Ambivalence and ParalysisHow might Mitchell’s question apply to Dorsey’s photograph? What does this image want from us? What does it demand from our acts of looking? The dispersed account of agency put forward by Mitchell suggests that the act of looking can never be contained within the subject; indeed, what is produced in each act of looking is some kind of subject-object-world assemblage in which each component is characterised by its potential and actual mobilities. With respect to Dorsey’s image, then, the multiple lines of sight at work in the photograph indicate multiple – and mobile – relationalities. Primarily, there is the relationship between the viewer – any potential viewer – and the photograph. If we follow Mitchell’s line of questioning, however, we need to ask how the photograph itself shapes the emotive and affective experience of visual interpretation – how the photograph’s demand is transmitted to the viewer.Firstly, this demand is channelled through Dorsey’s line of sight that extends through his camera’s viewfinder and into the formal elements of the photograph: the focused POW in the foreground, the blurred figures in the background, the light and shade on the subjects’ clothing and skin, the battle scarred terrain, and the position of these elements within the viewfinder’s frame. As viewers we cannot see Dorsey, but his presence fills – and indeed constitutes – the photograph. Secondly, the photograph’s demand is channelled through the POW’s line of sight that extends to Dorsey (who is both photographer and marine Sergeant), and potentially through his camera to imagined viewers. It is precisely the return gaze of the POW that packs such an affective punch – not because of what it means, but rather because of how it makes us feel emotionally and physically. While a conventional account would understand this affective punch as shocking, stopping or capturing the viewer, I want to argue it does the opposite – it suddenly reveals the fizzing, vibrant mobilities that transmit the picture to us, and us to the picture.There are, I think, important lessons for us in Dorsey’s photograph. It is a powerful antecedent to Judith Butler’s exploration of the Abu Graib images, and her repetition of Sontag’s question of “whether the tortured can and do look back, and what do they see when they look at us” (966). The POW’s gaze provides an answer to the first part of this question – they certainly do look back. But as to what they see when they look back at us, that question can only be answered if we redistribute both agency and mobility into the photograph to empower and mobilize the tortured, the abject, and the objectified.That leaves us with Sontag’s much more vexing question of what we do after we look at photographs. As Butler explains, Sontag has denounced the photograph “precisely because it enrages without directing the rage, and so excites our moral sentiments at the same time that it confirms our political paralysis” (966). This sets up an important challenge for us: in refusing conventional understandings of photography as a still visual art, how can we use more dispersed accounts of agency and mobility to work through the political paralysis that Sontag identifies. AcknowledgementsPaul Dorsey’s photograph of the Japanese POW is # 80-G-475166 in the NAPU archive, and is reproduced here courtesy of the United States National Archives.ReferencesAdorno, Theodore. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Bachner, Evan. Men of WWII: Fighting Men at Ease. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007.———. At Ease: Navy Men of WWII. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000.Benjamin, Walter. “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” In The Arcardes Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1999. 456-488.Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-66.Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.Lisle, Debbie. “Benevolent Patriotism: Art, Dissent and The American Effect.” Security Dialogue 38.2 (2007): 233-50.Mitchell, William.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.Perez, Gilberto. “Atget’s Stillness.” The Hudson Review 36.2 (1983): 328-37. Philips, Christopher. Steichen at War. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004.———. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1971Steichen, Edward. U.S. Navy War Photographs. New York: U.S. Camera, 1945.

Tourist practices to the Somme in the immediate aftermath of the Great War are politically significant because they mobilized contradictory experiences of commemoration, grief, reverence, leisure, spectacle and adventure. By the end of WWII, a much more toxic combination racism, patriarchy and dehumanization was at work as Allied forces made their way across the Pacific.

The chapter focuses on the impact of the HUAC hearings on Milestone’s personal and professional life. In 1950 the Milestones left Hollywood and travelled between LA and Europe for several years. He was interrogated by a HUAC investigator in Los Angeles and attacked in the press. Fox Studio’s Darryl Zanuck hired him to direct Halls of Montezuma, a WWII picture about an American assault on a Pacific island, starring Richard Widmark as a psychologically wounded officer; Kangaroo, an adventure filmed on location in Australia, with Peter Lawford, Richard Boone and Maureen O’Hara; and a routine adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables back in Hollywood.

In this chapter, Högberg traces a specific form of non-violent ethics across Woolf’s interwar and WWII writings, considering its political potential and limits. Focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of ‘The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other’(Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity’, 1984) alongside Judith Butler’s attempts to politicise his ethics of precariousness, this chapter shows how Woolf foregrounds vulnerability as an ethical injunction against violence. Arguing that Woolf’s work prompts a still unresolved question as to whether a pacifist ethics can be politically productive, Högberg reads Woolf’s pacifism as rooted in a concept of peace as proximity: the proximity of the ethical encounter, which prompts awakeness to the other’s vulnerability. The chapter ranges from Woolf’s Levinasian elevation, in Three Guineas, of a primary responsibility to Antigone’s Law of love, peace and proximity over the laws of the sovereign state to her literary articulations of an alternatively Levinasian and Butlerian ethics of peace and precariousness in Jacob’s Room, The Waves and Between the Acts. Voiced through poetic tropes of naked defencelessness and extra-linguistic, primal cries, Woolf’s pacifist ethics floods the boundaries defining Europe in a relocation of its ‘Greek’ origins, and in defiance against its political constructions of the other’s precarious face as a threat, which continue to justify the scandalous closing of European borders to ‘millions of bodies’ made vulnerable by war.