AHA Session 215
Saturday, January 6, 2024: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Continental Ballroom 5 (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Ruth Lawlor, Cornell University
Panel:
Andrew Buchanan, University of Vermont
Judith A. Byfield, Cornell University
Vina Lanzona, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Naina Manjrekar, Indian Institute of Technology
Ethan Mark, Leiden University
Session Abstract
The catalyst for the WWII was the twinned crisis of empire and liberal capitalism that swept the globe between 1929 and 1931. This upheaval undermined an older order already brought to the brink by inter-imperial competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and ushered in a new global order led by the United States. But the consolidation of American hegemony was a protracted process, coming to fruition only in the ten or more years after the formal end of hostilities. This new order, what C.L.R. James called “world mastery”, was finally sealed in the partition of the Korean peninsula in 1953, the end of civil wars and insurgencies in the so-called “revolutionary crescent” – stretching from China, India, and Burma, to Indonesia and Indochina – between 1949 and 1955, and the outcome of the Suez canal crisis in 1956. Understood in this context, it becomes clear that the WWII contained many wars, as peasant armies, anticolonial rebels, and partisans of all stripes exploited the conflict between the great powers to wage their own battles for freedom, independence, and an alternative political and economic system. Their struggles both preceded the wars of 1939 and 1941 to 1945 and would outlast them, but the maelstrom occasioned by the war’s explosive potential, its scrambling of people and nationalities, and its sense of possibility in a future beyond capitalism and imperialism, gave new momentum to revolutionary action across the globe. These liberation movements not only shaped the confrontation between the empires but also constituted the “stuff” of the WWII itself, understood in this framework as a multi-layered struggle to define a new future. It is in highlighting their resistance to exploitation and subjugation on the part of their colonial masters, that the real stakes of the “global” Second World War come fully into view. And, in their continued struggle against American intervention after 1945 – in Southeast Asia, in China, and elsewhere – these movements show that while the Second World War may have been a “great imperial war”, it was not, in the words of one historian writing recently, the “last imperial war.”
This roundtable brings together scholars working across a variety of geographic contexts in order to do for WWII what scholars have already achieved for WWI: to redefine this conflict as an inter-imperial war fought to organize the world in the wake of capitalism and imperialism’s apparent collapse. The panelists offer thoughts on a range of themes – eurocentrism, the nation, empire, social revolution, gender, race and class, postcolonial and subaltern approaches, ambiguous inheritances, the nature of fascism – in the context of several overarching questions related to the war’s chronology, its spatial dimensions, and its most important nerve centers. This roundtable will be chaired in an active and interactive format by Ruth Lawlor and Andrew Buchanan, and encourages substantial audience engagement. It will conclude by suggesting new ways of teaching this event which remains central to our understanding of the modern world.
