School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemDragging History Through the Gutters War Comic Books, Civic Duty & American Popular Memory, 1952-1993( 2022)The Cold War era (1945-1991) coincided with both the emergence and height of war comic books in the United States. Despite significant social, political, and comic industry shifts during this period, war comics remained a consistent presence in American culture. In this thesis, I examine the reasons for war comics’ continued success despite periods during the Cold War when comics were censored for their excessive violence and when military-themed culture declined. I also examine the ways in which these comics’ memorialisation of war contributed to contemporary debates about national identity and civic duty. From the late 1960s, comic creators and readers increasingly debated key issues about war, civic responsibility, and public protest. During this period, I argue that war comics promoted a populist anti-statist rhetoric that maintained the heroic ideal of the American soldier while at the same time reflecting public distrust of government institutions. In contrast to past studies of American war comics that predominantly portray these media as a form of unofficial government propaganda, I contend that war comics offered a space to contest the traditional American war story and ideas about civic duty. In doing so, war comics opened opportunities for seemingly polarised groups in American society, including Vietnam veterans and draft resisters, to form and share new narratives about war that transcended the conservative-liberal political divide of the post-Vietnam War period.
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ItemParadoxical Representations of Vietnamese Women in Propaganda: The Communist Party of Vietnam and Conflicting Visions of Women During the Vietnam War (1955-1975)( 2021)This thesis examines the paradoxical representations of Vietnamese women produced by the Vietnamese Communist Party (CPV) between 1955-1975. Through analysis of the changing representations of women, it questions the Party's commitment to gender equality. Furthermore, it challenges the assumption in previous scholarship that the Vietnam War was a period of increased rights and revolutionary change, and instead suggests that Vietnamese women were circumscribed by the persistence of Confucianism in CPV propaganda.
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ItemNostalgia and the warzone home: American and Australian veterans return to Việt Nam, 1981-2016( 2018)From 1981 to 2016, thousands of Australian and American veterans returned to Việt Nam. In this comparative oral history investigation, I examine why veterans returned and how they reacted to the people and places of Việt Nam—their former enemies, allies, and battlefields—as the war receded further into history and memory. Tracing veterans’ returns through economic, cultural, and political shifts in Việt Nam, Australia, and the US, I identify three distinct periods of return: contact, normalization, and commemoration. These periods reflect the changing meanings of “Vietnam” in Australia and the US and describe the relationship of veterans to the contemporary, peacetime space of Việt Nam. Very different narratives about the war informed Australian and American returns: Australians followed an Anzac tradition of battlefield pilgrimage, whereas for Americans the return constituted a radical, anti-war act. Despite these differences in timing and nationality of return, commonalities emerged among them: veterans returned out of nostalgia for a warzone home, responding to the “needs of the present” by turning back toward “Vietnam.” When veterans arrived in Việt Nam, they found that their warzone home was unrecognizable, replaced with unfamiliar places, politics, and people. Returnees faced conflicting challenges and rewards. Many reported that seeing Việt Nam at peace diluted their memories of war, and brought them a measure of relief. Yet this peacetime reality also disrupted their wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. Returnees navigated this challenge by drawing from the same wartime narratives that had informed their returns. Consequently, anti-war and Anzac memories shaped how returnees interpreted and interacted with peacetime Việt Nam as returnees recaptured their sense of belonging to the warzone home by relying on familiar stories about a suddenly unfamiliar place. Thus while the return experiences challenged returnees’ wartime memories, the return did not change their views so much as reinforce existing perspectives. Furthermore, while returning to Việt Nam helped many veterans to put “Vietnam” behind them, there was not total separation between war and country. As the numbers of returnees rose and expatriate-veteran enclaves emerged, the wartime narratives through which veterans navigated the return took on greater impact, collapsing time through space through nostalgic practices to relocate the warzone home.
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ItemThe yeast is red( 1994)The Yeast is Red is a case study of the Australian new left of the late sixties. The new left initially emerged as part of a movement of growing opposition to the Vietnam War. The war shattered the previously dominant framework of 'Cold War' assumptions and profoundly altered the Australian political culture. Even though Vietnam and the associated conscription of male youths was the catalyst for the youth radicalisation of the sixties which produced the new left, the new radical consciousness was caused also by the effects of the social and cultural changes of the period. While actively opposing the foreign war, theorists of the new left began to develop an original and sophisticated critique, based partly on the demand for more participatory democratic forms, of their own society. Vietnam, an increasingly unpopular involvement, became a metaphor for what was seen as a suffocating and conformist malaise at home.