Stop, Look, and Listen #18
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warning: Racism; Islamophobia.
Interwar fascism and its aftermaths
New Books Network recently hosted three discussions with authors of books on fascism in and between Germany and Japan during the interwar period, and their legacies. On its German Studies channel, Craig Sorvillo interviewed Ricky W. Law about his book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936. Law noted that the topic of Japanese-German relations between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power had previously been relatively ignored, and that redressing this had required a broader cultural history approach, involving analysis of newspapers, films, non-fiction writing, lectures, language learning materials, and voluntary organisations.
He argued that while Japan may not have been a fascist state itself, one way fascism did manifest in the country was in enthusiasm for Nazism and for Hitler. This formed part of a much broader fascination with German rightist figures and themes, which far outweighed German interest in Japan, was malleable enough to appeal to different classes, and survived in different forms after the Second World War ended.
Max Ward was the guest on the East Asian Studies channel, talking to Nathan Hopson about his book Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, which focuses on the 1925 Peace Preservation Law that compelled communists to renounce Marxism and its applicability in Japan, and to re-embrace the purity of the nation state. Ward explained how this law rested on a nebulous concept of ‘Tenko’ (thought crime), and provoked much debate on how to meaningfully rehabilitate ex-communists, which subsequently extended to anticolonial activists as well. He also highlighted the continuing influence of this rehabilitation programme on seemingly liberal post-war Japanese criminal justice reforms.
Finally, once again on the German Studies channel, Eric Grube interviewed David O. Pendas about his book Democracy, Nazi Trials and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950. Pendas explained that the authorities in Soviet-occupied Germany undertook a rigorous approach towards prosecuting former Nazis, which proved the way for the nascent new regime to identify the antifascist credentials of senior officials in its inherited legal system.
By contrast, in the other occupied zones, overwhelmingly right-wing lawyers and judges adopted the liberal norms of due process as a means of avoiding prosecution of fellow travellers, but in the process bound themselves into upholding this system. Pendas argued that this comparison challenges dominant thinking in transitional justice practice, which assumes the process is innately democratising; he instead advocated for pursuing this form of justice for its own sake.
Envisioning the alien
Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison were joined by David Halperin on the American Prestige podcast to talk about his book, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. Halperin highlighted the biblical precedents for alien myths, such as in Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel in the sky. He also explored how concerns over nuclear weapons spurred the fears about unidentified flying objects during the Cold War, and how repressed White guilt about the Atlantic slave trade may have manifested in stories of alien abduction. The discussion subsequently moved onto the resurgent popularity of fictional works about aliens in the 1990s, from the liberal optimism of Independence Day and Men in Black, to the pessimism and paranoia of The X-Files.
Screen representations of alien encounters were also the theme of an episode of the ACFM podcast with Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert, and Keir Milburn. Their wide-ranging discussion took in the roots of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and its various adaptations in late nineteenth-century colonialism and invasion panics; liberal Cold War-era films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; more paranoid ones such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, and They Live; and more contemporary productions, including those made in the Global South, such as the South African film District 9.
Hinduism, nationalism, state, and diaspora
Back in January, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration ceremony for the new Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya, on the site of the former Babri Masjid mosque, which was infamously attacked and destroyed by a crowd of Hindu nationalists in 1992. This inauguration was the subject of an episode of Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast, hosted by Aparna Gopalan, with guests Siddhartha Deb, Angana Chatterji, and Safa Ahmed. They discussed the importance of the 1992 riots as a turning point in the history of Modi’s hitherto marginal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and how the temple signified the BJP’s militant religious nationalism, which seeks to monopolise what it is to be Hindu. They also explored this sequence of events as demonstrating the rise of a genocidal Islamophobia in India comparable with Israel’s approach to Palestinians, and the role of Western states and global anti-Muslim sentiments in Modi’s political ascent.
Diversity in Hinduism, by contrast, is very much the dominant theme in Knut A. Jacobsen’s edited volume, The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora. He spoke with Raj Balkaran on New Books Network’s Indian Religions channel about how different waves of migration of Hindus across the globe have culminated in significant geographical variation in the prevalence of different Hindu ethnic groups and their particular religious traditions. Jacobsen also emphasised the portability of Hinduism and its rituals, its complex relationship with the Indian state, and the uneasy relationship between Hindu minorities in the diaspora and Western converts.
The politics of the canon
On the Cursed Objects podcast, Dan Hancox and Kasia Tee looked at the bizarre range of products sold by the Conservative Party, including gimmicky items lambasting Labour or lionising the ‘canon’ of Conservative Prime Ministers. These objects, they argued, exist less for fundraising purposes than for mobilising the enthusiasm among party faithful, raising the question as to what motivates this sort of enthusiasm among supporters of a party effectively dedicated to maintaining the status quo.
The politics of a very different canon was the subject of this episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, on Disney’s 2023 film Wish, hosted by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant and featuring guest Robyn Muir. They considered its relationship to Disney’s centenary, and its deliberate nods to the studio’s earlier films, including in its animation style. They also explored Wish’s treatment of the theme of wishing itself, the tensions between individual and communal wish fulfilment, and the question of who or what represents Disney itself in this analogy.
It was really helpful reflecting on these two episodes together, having given a lot of thought myself to how ideas of ‘the canon’ function and flow between culture and politics, including in my own earlier post on Wish from back in December.
All of which raises the real key question: if Keir Starmer buffed up and grew a beard and some charisma, could he be Britain’s King Magnifico?1
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If you haven’t watched the film, this is not a compliment, except maybe to Starmer’s hairdo.
Gonna be chuckling about that Starmer reference for a good while 🤣