Showing papers on "Expansionism published in 1996"

Moscow-The Third Rome or the New Israel?

Abstract: ecent events in the former Soviet Union have stimulated the rethinking of many previously axiomatic notions about the past and present of Russia. This situation creates a propitious environment for the reexamination of received views of the Russian past, including the famous idea that sixteenth-century Russians thought of themselves as inhabitants of "The Third Rome." This idea, which sometimes seems like the only idea that the general public knows about Muscovite Russia apart from the imagined character and reign of Ivan the Terrible, has helped to create the impression that Muscovite Russia was exotic and expansionist, a worthy predecessor of the "evil empire" that occupied people's attention in the 1980s and before. This image of Muscovy, in turn, promotes the notion in the minds of Russians and foreigners alike that Russia is destined by her Muscovite past to behave in certain ways. Most specialists in the Muscovite period of Russian history are already aware that the conventional notion of the Third Rome theory as an early justification for Russian expansionism is badly flawed; the idea continues nevertheless to remain popular among nonspecialist writers. This article will point out briefly the relative scarcity of evidence for the Third Rome theme in Muscovite sources, especially in sources that originated before the 1590s. Most of our attention, however, will be devoted to exploring a complementary theme, a theme that is overwhelmingly better represented in the source base than the Third Rome idea, but that answers the same basic question about the self-image of the Muscovite state: the idea of Russia as a New Israel. Both themes were products of the Muscovite perception of history as a succession of chosen peoples: Israel to Roman Empire to Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) to Muscovy. (Other lists of chosen peoples were also available,

Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature

Abstract: This reflection on colonial culture argues for an examination of “Indochina” as a fictive and mythic construct, a phantasmatic legacy of French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Panivong Norindr uses postcolonial theory to demonstrate how French imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. In this careful reading of architecture, film, and literature, Norindr lays bare the processes of fantasy, desire, and nostalgia constituent of French territorial aggression against Indochina. Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, Norindr shows how the exhibition’s display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France’s cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism. He critiques the Surrealist counter-exposition mounted to oppose the imperialist aims of the Exposition Coloniale, and the Surrealist incorporation and appropriation of native artifacts in avant-garde works. According to Norindr, all serious attempts at interrogating French colonial involvement in Southeast Asia are threatened by discourse, images, representations, and myths that perpetuate the luminous aura of Indochina as a place of erotic fantasies and exotic adventures. Exploring the resilience of French nostalgia for Indochina in books and movies, the author examines work by Malraux, Duras, and Claudel, and the films Indochine , The Lover , and Dien Bien Phu . Certain to impact across a range of disciplines, Phantasmatic Indochina will be of interest to those engaged in the study of the culture and history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, as well as specialists in the fields of French modernism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

The Frontiers of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion

Abstract: Although the myth of the American frontier is largely the product of writings by men, a substantial body of writings by women exists that casts the era of western expansion in a different light. In this study of American women's writings about the West between 1830 and 1930, a European scholar provides a reconstruction and new vision of frontier narrative from a perspective that has frequently been overlooked or taken for granted in discussions of the frontier. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay presents a range of writings that reflects the diversity of the western experience. Beginning with the narratives of Caroline Kirkland and other women of the early frontier, she reviews the diaries of the overland trails; letters and journals of the wives of army officers during the Indian wars; professional writings, focusing largely on travel, by women such as Caroline Leighton from the regional publishing cultures that emerged in the Far West during the last quarter of the century; and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts of missionaries and teachers on Indian reservations. Most of the writers were white, literate women who asserted their own kind of cultural authority over the lands and people they encountered. Their accounts are not only set in relation to a masculine frontier myth but also investigated for clues about their own involvement with territorial expansion. By exploring the various ways in which women writers actively contributed to and at times rejected the development of a national narrative of territorial expansion based on empire building and colonization, the author shows how their accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment. Georgi-Findlay has drawn on American studies scholarship, feminist criticism, and studies of colonial discourse to examine the strategies of women's representation in writing about the West in ways that most theorists have not. She critiques generally accepted stereotypes and assumptions--both about women's writing and its difference of view in particular, and about frontier discourse and the rhetoric of westward expansion in general--as she offers a significant contribution to literary studies of the West that will challenge scholars across a wide range of disciplines.

The Formative Years of the American Society of International Law

Abstract: The United States at the dawn of the twentieth century was just beginning to comprehend the influence it could have on the international scene. It had no desire to become involved in the European power politics that had produced, in the lifetimes of many Americans then living, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War and the essentially European Boer War in South Africa. Nevertheless, a distinct strain of expansionism could be found in American foreign policy. The belief was stirring in those concerned to establish a nonviolent world order that the interaction of nation-states would benefit from exposure to American values, American economic dynamism and the lessons to be drawn from the American federal experience. This belief, combined with a deep aversion to what was seen as essentially a European proclivity for settling disputes by resort to war, motivated some of the more influential participants in the American peace movement. That movement, in turn, gave birth to the American Society of International Law.

Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine US War against Cuba

Abstract: Until now, the story of Narciso Lopez's daring invasions of Cuba has remained one of the great lost sagas of American history. Wildly famous during the mid-nineteenth century as the leader of a filibuster, a clandestine army, Lopez led the first armed challenge to Spain's long domination over Cuba. While U.S. historians have tended to view Lopez as an agent of pre-Civil War southern expansionism, Tom Chaffin reveals a broader, more complicated picture. Although many southerners did assist Lopez, the web of intrigue that sustained his conspiracy also included New York City, steamship magnates, penny press editors, Cuban industrialists, and nothern Democratic urban bosses.Drawn from archives in both the United States and Cuba and enlivened by first-person accounts and reports from federal "special agents" assigned to spy on Lopez, Fatal Glory holds appeal for both scholars and the general reader with an interest in Cuba, U.S. foreign policy, or the U.S. sectional crisis of the 1850s.

The Middle East into the 21st Century: The Japan Lectures and Other Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Gulf Crisis and Political Islam

Abstract: This book is the author's way to fulfil a belief in ideas as movers of a history in the making. In a Middle East where the Arab-Israeli and Gulf conflicts cannot be thought separately there is a need for an effective redirecting of the structural frameworks towards a comprehensive and innovative peace where borders and armies count less, and for a practice of change in Iraq which is based on working opposition institutions. Whilst the appreciation of Iranian Islamic expansionism should operate primarily with a view to Iran's own fault-lines and the domestic set-ups in the countries concerned, the whole search for a kinder and richer Middle East must refine its language by a series of detours. The detours include the weaving of the classical tradition of Islamic law into modern legal experiments, the appreciation of what really makes a state stable, the difficult theoretical questions raised by Islamic movements, and the need for new constitutional frameworks and a legal fluidity in the region as a whole, in which nation-states get less rigid, and freedom of movement and political expression for the individual are made issues of priority.