Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The long period in military history dominated by conventional warfare (between established national armies expected to wear uniforms and to engage each other on battlefields largely separate from civilians) has been giving way to more unconventional tacti

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: From 1942 to 1945, writing on a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Ralph Ellison developed a narrative episode whose central dramatic tension arises from the internment of a black U.S. pilot in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp—a World War II story that he not only later described, in mise-en-abîme fashion, as a "war within a war," but also, credited as a conceptual influence on his 1952 Invisible Man. Of this project that he ultimately would move away from but not entirely abandon, all that remains is a suggestive folder of draft fragments and reference materials housed at the Library of Congress under the misleadingly finished rubric, "Airman Novel." Featuring a brooding African American airman who, in a sacrificial gesture, bails out of a disabled plane over the European Theater, is captured, and is subsequently interned in a Nazi POW camp, the "Airman Novel," as a novel of ideas, engages powerfully with Ellison's Popular Front antifascist politics. In this paper, I look at this critically neglected, unpublished tale of World War II in order to examine how it is fundamentally preoccupied with what Ellison, wresting the term away from Gunnar Myrdal, deemed the "American dilemma." Albeit set outside the geographic parameters of the United States in territory marked as Axis, this war story dialectically engages the "American dilemma" on enemy terrain and in so doing suggests a discomfiting Axis and Allied identity.

Speaking squarely to paradoxes inherent in U.S. democracy, the very subject "placed outside the democratic master plan" is, in Ellison's war novel, forcibly grounded in a site located outside the territorial confines of the U.S.—a site that, however eccentric to the U.S. proper, functions as the latter's distorted yet telling mirror. Estranged into a fascist context, Ellison's black POW, a figure of historical dispossession positioned at the vanguard of the U.S. war machine, ironically emerges the face and singular redemptive possibility of American democracy. As a black Icarus who has tumbled onto critical geostrategic coordinates in the European theater, the downed flyer not only serves as "the image of the American" (Ellison), but also, from his grounded position, represents the tenuous political possibility of transracial fraternity and reconceived humanity. "[W]hen one looks around the globe for the truly human motivation behind this potentially peoples' war," Ellison asserted in 1942 in Negro Quarterly, a war-era journal he co-edited from with Angelo Herndon, "one finds it expressed most intensely among the darker peoples." A self-consciously racialized narrative of a wartime encounter between historic foes—Allied and Axis, black and white segregationist—Ellison's war novel is motivated by more than a modernist yearning to connect. Rather, through a sustained meditation on the question of the "more human," his narrative seeks to excavate an emergent, more supple "human" prospect of "real fraternal, i.e., democratic, values" and endeavors to locate this prospect in the underside of a racialized total war. Only in its ground-level potential as a "peoples' war," this story intimates, can World War II be understood as "a good fight."

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The question of why states comply with international law lies at the intersection of international relations (IR) and international law (IL) scholarship. In addition, the domestic and international outrage at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay has brought U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions into the public discourse. Understanding whether these events were an anomaly or whether they reflect existing trends in U.S. compliance with the laws of war is crucial to understanding what is next for the United States in this current climate of warfare. It has become shorthand among some academics, policy-makers, and pundits to assume the Bush Administration has systematically ignored international law. This paper examines the sources of variation in U.S. treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs) over time in order to compare and contrast the adherence to the international laws governing the treatment of prisoners during Operation Iraqi Freedom with previous U.S. conflicts abroad. This paper seeks to fill a gap in the empirical understanding about the correspondence between state behavior and legal rules. It empirically measures the normative force of international law by examining if there are noticeable patterns associated with variations in compliance. This broader debate about the importance of norms is consequential to a broad range of theoretical and policy issues in the new legal environment of the Global War on Terror.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For many years considered a “forgotten” war, the Korean conflict has recently been recast as a significant event in United States history. One disturbing aspect of the Korean War fueled worries over perceived flaws in the “national character.” American servicemen who had been captured by Koreans and Chinese apparently collaborated extensively with their captors, and this level of collaboration seemed to be unprecedented Social and behavioral scientists were heavily engaged in research on the causes of this collaboration; their competing accounts erupted into a culture war. In this essay I focus on a short “training film,” narrated by the actor and future President Ronald Reagan, which provided a definitive public account of POW collaboration. Because this narrative linked the psychoanalytic worldview of a newly-formed “military-intellectual complex” with a call for a return to traditional American values, it proved rhetorically resilient.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript