In This Issue

     This rather full issue contains a mixture of very different sorts of pieces, several of which overlap in interesting ways. It opens with research articles on Poland and on China, which share a common concern with cultural and political currents of the period around 1900. These are followed by a Forum that analyzes cinematic representations of World War II and the changing place of that traumatic event in American, Russian, and British national memory. Next comes an AHR Forum Essay—which, like last year's, will be the focal point for an online exchange with the author. (See the Introduction on page 865 for details.) It compares and contrasts the operation of racial categories in varied colonial settings. Finishing off the article section is a review essay that revisits the theme of commemoration so central to the World War II Forum, by way of a critical assessment of Pierre Nora's influential series of volumes on French national memory. The issue also contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Larry Wolff takes as his point of departure an oft-cited essay on fin-de-siècle Vienna by Carl Schorske that appeared in these pages exactly forty years ago. His focus, though, is not on the Austrian capital but rather on another important, though much less studied Habsburg metropolis: Cracow. Wolff describes the complex interplay between conservative and modernist trends in this Polish city, while illuminating as well the significance of Gallician loyalism in the politics of the day. Famous events (such as the anarchist assassination of Habsburg empress Elisabeth in 1898) and major works of literature (such as a 1901 play whose title translates as "The Wedding") are put into context. In addition, the rhetoric of the press is examined, and subsidiary themes such as the importance of violent images in contemporary poetry are discussed.

     Joan Judge addresses a theme that has recently generated considerable attention in many historiographical literatures: the gendered nature of nationalism. Her focus is on the experiences and writings of the first generation of Chinese women to address nationalist issues, a group of female students who went to Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her article juxtaposes two paradigms of the relationship between women and the nation. The first, articulated by conservative cultural authorities in China and Japan, indirectly links women to the nation through their virtue, making the domestic sphere the most meaningful context for female self-definition. The second, which the overseas students themselves embraced, ties women directly to the fate of the nation through their talents and deems national history the only significant context for the unfolding of female subjectivities. Judge's close examination of the way these two paradigms converged and diverged in an intriguing setting sheds new light on an enduring paradox: while an appeal to radical nationalism can enable women to challenge existing gender ideologies, it can also constrain the development of autonomous visions of feminine selfhood. In this case, having repudiated the principles of nationalist patriarchy, female Chinese students in Japan ended up replacing it with an equally confining patriotic femininity.

AHR Forum

     Cinematic representations of World War II and the ways that films reflect as well as help shape national and other forms of collective memory have been the subject of scholarly scrutiny and popular commentary for some time. One period of particularly intense interest came in the mid to late 1990s, due to the confluence of marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war and the production of high-profile movies such as Saving Private Ryan. This Forum—comprised of pieces that focus on the United States (John Bodnar), Britain (Geoff Eley), and the Soviet Union (Denise J. Youngblood) and a commentary by a leading scholar of World War I (Jay Winter)—was first envisioned at that time, but it appears in print during an equally interesting moment for thinking broadly about the topic. This is due to the subsequent completion of several new films on World War II, from recent foreign-language Academy Award–winner Life Is Beautiful (an Italian film), to Pearl Harbor (a big budget Hollywood epic), to Enemy at the Gates (reviewed individually elsewhere in this issue). If we needed further proof of the importance of coming to terms with the varied ways that World War II lives on in the popular culture of different lands, including but by no means limited to those discussed in this Forum, these and other films provide it. There is thus a timely quality, as well as long-term interest, in the insightful discussions that Bodnar, Eley, and Youngblood provide of the differing celluloid wars that filmmakers of successive generations have crafted in three of the countries that pride themselves on having helped to defeat the Axis powers. The continuing centrality of mediated memories of World War II also underscores the significance of Winter's insistence that we keep struggling to refine the analytical tools at our disposal when trying to interpret cinematic representations of that event and its complex place in collective psyches.

AHR Forum Essay

     Patrick Wolfe argues for a new approach to comparative and particularly cross-colonial studies, in which significant generalizations are made without jeopardizing the individuality of particular situations. He makes his case for this method via a close look at the basic colonial relationships whereby land and labor were differentially exploited. Wolfe's focus is on the histories of four colonized peoples—African Americans, Native Americans, Afro-Brazilians, and Australian Aborigines—and the varied workings of racialized categories in the processes of exploitation to which these peoples were subjected. By tackling both a topic of great concern to historians working on varied times and places and raising methodological issues of potential interest to all members of the discipline, Wolfe's Forum Essay is an ideal one to use as the starting point for an open-ended online exchange. This is precisely what will take place in early September (see the Introduction to the Forum Essay for details), and AHR readers interested in taking part are encouraged to send in their commentaries at that time.

Review Essay

     Hue-Tam Ho Tai assesses the monumental studies of French national memory edited by Pierre Nora, which initially ran to seven volumes and have been published in a stripped-down but still massive four-volume English-language translation. Tai, a specialist in Vietnamese history who has been working on issues associated with war and memory, compares the contents of the French and English versions of the project. She is particularly attentive to the ways in which individual contributors and the volumes as a whole define "France" and what it means to be French. She illuminates both the accomplishments of Nora and his colleagues and the things that they, either intentionally or inadvertently, seem to have been oblivious to or have chosen to ignore.

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