Between Two Worlds: Slovak Language and American Identity in Out of This Furnace

Abstract

Thomas Bell’s 1941 novel Out of This Furnace, a fictionalized account of his family’s immigration from eastern Slovakia to industrial Pittsburgh, is a significant example of the use of ‘mixed languages’ in ethnic American literature. It was translated from English into Slovak in 1949 as Dva svety (Two Worlds). The novel has bridged the gap between Slovak and American culture in the three ways explored here: Bell’s use of Slovak dialect, the Slovak translation, and two dramatic adaptations from the 1970s (an American play and a Slovak televised film). This case illuminates the complex relationship between ethnic American writers and their lands of origin, particularly in the case of less commonly spoken languages.     

The Information Environment of War

This article observes high levels of anxiety about war in the present era, although wars are in decline. It addresses this paradox by distinguishing ideal‐typical features of Industrial and Information War. Industrial War is fought predominantly between states over territory, harnesses industry and the military, and requires mass mobilisation of people as well as resources. Information War is the prerogative of a few advanced societies and has emerged in a context that has enabled the extension of market practices on a global scale (with America as a unipolar power). Information War transcends frontiers, is asymmetrical, and its hard side is manifest in digitalised technologies and small professional forces. However, its soft side evokes the expanded and fast‐changing information environment of globalised media, trans‐national networks and the Internet. Through these, media wars can be experienced intensely by civilians who are otherwise untouched: at once close up and far away. This contributes to heightened consciousness of war, although such spectators are removed from danger. Although interests try to control information flows from and about war, the information environment is huge, shifting and unpredictable. As such, it is impossible to control fully, thereby presenting opportunities for vigorous symbolic struggles involving anti‐war campaigners and others.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: War Wounds: Development Costs of Conflict in the Southern Sudan - The Sudanese People Report On Their War Confronting Poverty in Developing Countries: Definitions, Information and Policies. By Paul Glewwe and Jacques van der Gaag The Poor and the Poorest: Some Interim Findings. By Michael Lipton Income Distribution and Economic Development in Malawi: Some Historical Statistics. By Frederic L. Pryor Development Economics on Trial. By Polly Hill The European Community and the Developing World. By Marjorie Lister     

A review essay: Reconstruction compared to what?

When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self‐Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867. Dan Carter. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1985. 275pp. £15.55.

Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877. Ted Tunnell. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1984. 252pp. $25.00.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this article Social Problems: A Critical Analysis of Theories and Public Policy by R. P. Lowry Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance, 1850–1880 by W. Hamish Fraser The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting by Daniel Bell A Mythology of British Education by Robert Bell and Nigel Grant Trade Unionism by J. A. Banks Inside a Curriculum Project by M. D. Shipman, with D. Bolam and D. Jenkins The Prisonei's Release by Keith Soothill The Scope of Understanding in Sociology by Werner Pelz Sociology and the Demystification of the Modem World by John Rex Cultures, Vol. I. No. I: ‘Music and Society’ Citizens in Conflict: The Sociology of Town Planmng by J. M. Simmie Strikes and Industrial Conflict by G. K. Ingham Apprentices Out of Their Time: A Follow-Up Study by Ethel VenaMes Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 by Robert W. Atalccdmson Sociology and Development by E. de Kadt and G. Williams Concepts in Socud Administration: A Framework for Analysis by A. Forder Connections: Notes from the Heroin World by Leroy C. Gould, Andrew L. Walker, Lansing E. Crane and Charles W. Lidz Computers and the Social Sciences by Alan Brier and Ian Robinson Incest by Herbert Maish Stratification: An Essay on Class and Inequality by R. K. Kelsall and H. M. Relsall Personnel Pkmning and Occupational Choice by S. Timperley     

And Neither Are We Saved: Asian Americans' Elusive Quest for Racial Justice

Derrick Bell, Civil Rights activist, legal scholar, and a founder of critical race theory, dedicated much of his life and scholarship to the pursuit of racial justice. Twenty‐six years ago, in his work And We Are Not Saved, he recognized that racial progress has been stalled and racial equality would not be a reality in his lifetime. Bell passed away in October 2011, and we are reminded that there is still much work to do. He presented a conundrum that race scholars have said all there is to say about racial problems in the United States; yet, he encouraged scholars to keep moving the work forward. At the time And We Are Not Saved was written, much of the racial scholarship was centered on the Black–White paradigm. In the 26 years since Bell wrote it, there has been a growth of Asian American research. This essay surveys some critical racial analysis of Asian Americans. There have been major contributions to the literature extending racial scholarship beyond the Black–White paradigm. Additionally, intersectional scholarship extends the discussion into other systems of oppression, highlighting how racism can be veiled in different systems. Critical race scholarship is imperative to keep Bell's dream of racial equality alive.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible, 2^nd Ed. Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture & the Cultivation of Sustainability, by Michael Mayerfeld Bell. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, James W. Loewen. Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development, edited by Arvonne S. Fraser and Irene Tinker. The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies, by Peggy Antrobus. Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent: Power, Conservation, and the State in Mexico, by Nora Haenn.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative Agriculture through Social Networks, by Keith Douglas Warner Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life, by Hugh Campbell, Michael Mayerfield Bell, and Margaret Finney Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, by Daniel Jaffee Service Delivery to Rural Older Adults: Research, Policy, and Practice, by R. Turner Goins and John A. Krout Movimientos Sociales de los Trabajadores Agrícolas Asalariados en el noroeste de México, 1970–1995, by Florencio Posadas Segura     

Review article: National and racial minorities in total war

Ansel Adams, Manzanar (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989). xx + 167pp. £15.

Joseph Kennedy, British Civilians and the Japanese War in Malaya and Singapore, 1941–45 (London: Macmillan, 1987). xii + 167pp. £29.50.

Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). ix + 257pp. £29.95.

François Lafitte, The Internment of Aliens (London: Libris, 1988, 1990). xxiv + 266pp. £24.95 hb; £8.95 pb.

Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, 1990). vi + 310pp. £14.95 hb, £4.99 pb.

Frederick C. Luebke, Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict During World War I (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). xii + 248pp. £30.90.

Graham A. Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain (London: I.B. Taurus, 1987). 265pp. £14.95.     

Vietnam as a class war: Myth or reality?

This article reports an extension of the analyses of the fatalities in the Vietnam War presented by Barnett, Stanley, and Shore (1992) as printed in the September‐October 1992 Operations Research. The additional analyses involved an examination of results by Barnett et al. in numeric as well as percentage form and a consideration of how the revised analyses generalize to the population of all American fatalities in Vietnam. These analyses yielded a different conclusion about the role of economic class in the fatalities in the Vietnam War than those drawn by Barnett et al. They suggested that the term class war was not supported by their data analyses. Our analyses indicate that their conclusion is incorrect. The lower class sacrificed considerably more lives than the upper class.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Development strategies for the 1980s: Disillusion,confusion and hope

Inside the Third World: The Anatomy of Poverty by Paul Harrison, London: Harvester Press and Penguin, 1979.

The Third World Tomorrow: A Report from the Battlefront in the War against Poverty by Paul Harrison, London: Harvester Press and Penguin, 1980     

Collateral Damage on the Home Front: The Gulf in America

>Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Evolution of Inequality: War, State Survival and Democracy in Comparative Perspective, by Manus I. Midlarsky. Caught in the Middle: Contradictions in the Lives of Sociologists From Working‐Class Backgrounds, by Michael D. Grimes and Joan M. Morris. Welfare Bushed: Social Care in Rural Australia, by Brian Cheers. Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets and Community Among a Migrant Pastoral People, by Arun Agrawal.     

Review essay: Between two wars: The rise and fall of Chattel Slavery in Georgia

Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860. Julia Floyd Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia. Clarence L. Mohr. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1986.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.     

Book Reviews

Free Trade: Myths, Reality and Alternatives. By Graham Dunkley. Agriculture and the WTO: Creating a Trading System for Development. Edited by Merlinda D. Ingco and John D. Nash. Competitiveness Strategy in Developing Countries: A Manual for Policy Analysis. Edited by Ganeshan Wignaraja. Ploughing Up The Farm: Neoliberalism, Modern Technology and the State of the World's Farmers. By Jerry Buckland. The Divergent Dynamics of Economic Growth: Studies in Adaptive Economizing, Technological Change, and Economic Development. By Richard H. Day. Survival for a Small Planet: The Sustainable Development Agenda. Edited by Tom Bigg. Measuring Sustainability: Learning from Doing. By Simon Bell and Stephen Morse. Structural Adjustment: The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty and Inequality. By SAPRIN. Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post‐Apartheid South Africa. By Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd. The Virtuous Vice: Globalization. Edited by Siamack Shojai and Robert Christopherson. Knowledge For Development? Comparing British, Japanese, Swedish and World Bank Aid. By Kenneth King and Simon McGrath. The Contemporary Caribbean. By Robert B. Potter, David Barker, Dennis Conway and Thomas Klak.     

Warriors without spears: Africans in the South African War, 1899–1902

Black People in the South African War 1899–1902, by Peter Warwick. Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1983. Pp. xiv & 224: maps, tables.     

Collateral damage on the home front: The gulf in America

Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.     

Talcott Parsons and national socialism: The case of the “ten mysterious missing letters”

This essay is a response to questions raised by my review of a book by Uta Gerhardt called Talcott Parsons on National Socialism.In short, I found many issues unresolved in the Cold War years from 1946 to 1954 at Harvard University, especially the role of Talcott Parons and Clyde Kluckhohn in allegedly bringing Nazi collaborators to the United States. I have tried to address these controversial issues in this response.