A research agenda on feminist texts and the gendered constitution of international politics in rebecca west's black lamb and grey falcon

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 109-128

  Hansen, Lene ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN   (Denmark)

Author keywords

Empire; Feminism; Rebecca west; Resistance; Sacrifice

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052318908     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811412432     Document Type: Article

References (180)

1. Zalewski on Marysia Zalewski, Ann Tickner, Christine Sylvester, Margot Light, Vivienne Jabri, Kimberly Hutchings and Fred Halliday, 'Roundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2008): 153-79.
2. Christina Rowley and Laura Shepherd, 'The Week on Gender: Feminists Teaching IR', unpublished paper presented at 'The Space between Us' workshop at the University of Bristol, 2006.
3. reference in Zalewski et al., 'Roundtable Discussion'.
4. Jabri on 'Roundtable Discussion', 165-8.
5. Ibid., 174.
6. Kimberly Hutchings, 'Good Fathers and Rebellious Daughters: Reading Women in Benhabib's International Political Theory', Journal of International Political Theory 5, no. 2 (2009): 113-24.
7. Paul Saurette, '"I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid Them": Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 25, no. 1 (1996): 1-28.
8. Patrick Hayden, 'Superfluous Humanity: An Arendtian Perspective on the Political Evil of Global Poverty', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 2 (2007): 279-300.
9. J. Ann Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 3 (1988): 429-40.
10. Kimberly Hutchings, 'Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence', Hypatia 22, no. 3 (2007): 111-32.
11. This article was published prior to the 2008 Roundtable, but it brings Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity from 1948 to bear on the questions raised by Christine Sylvester on feminism and violence.
12. Christine Sylvester, 'Whither the International at the End of IR', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 551-73.
13. See also Ole Wæver, 'Still a Discipline after All These Debates?', in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 288-308.
14. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Viking Press, 1941).
15. Jean B. Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
16. Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism'.
17. Cynthia Weber, 'Good Girls, Little Girls and Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane's Critique of Feminist International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no. 2 (1994): 337-49.
18. Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 112-16.
19. Quoted from Bernard Schweizer, Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 9.
20. For a discussion of Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe and Tickner as 'indisputable classics' or 'masters in the making'.
21. see Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
22. Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, 'Jean Bethke Elshtain: Traversing the Terrain Between', in The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making, eds Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver (London: Routledge, 1997), 290-315.
23. See also Richard Ned Lebow, 'Texts, Paradigms, and Political Change', in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations, ed. Michael C. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241-68.
24. Stephen M. Walt, 'My "Top Ten" Books Every Student of International Relations Should Read', posted on 9 April 2009 at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/09/my_top_ten_books_every_student_of_international_relations_should_read.
25. Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
26. Hayden, 'Superfluous Humanity'; Saurette, '"I Mistrust All Systematizers and Avoid Them"'.
27. Tim Dunne, Michael Cox and Ken Booth, 'Introduction: The Eighty Years Crisis', Review of International Studies 24, no. 5 (1998): v-xii.
28. Michael C. Williams, ed., Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
29. Hutchings, 'Simone de Beauvoir'; Gillian Youngs, 'Cosmopolitanism and Feminism in the Age of the "War on Terror": A Twenty-First Century Reading of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas', in Cosmopolitanism in Practice, eds Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco (Abingdon: Ashgate), 145-59.
30. Christine Sylvester, 'Tensions in Feminist Security Studies', Security Dialogue 41, no. 6 (2010): 610-13.
31. The focus on factional texts and genres implies that fiction is included to the extent that it generates sufficiently factional engagement. The research agenda suggested here is thus supplementary to those constructed around literature and IR, or, more broadly, most of what falls within popular culture and IR.
32. for an overview, see Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, 'Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics', Global Society 24, no. 3 [2010]: 299-309.
33. Peter Wolfe, Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 25-6.
34. Raluca Soreanu and David Hudson, 'Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2008): 143.
35. Soreanu and Hudson identify sociology, geography and legal studies as disciplines brought into IR by feminists.
36. Ibid., 141-2.
37. Ole Wæver, 'Figures of International Thought: Introducing Persons instead of Paradigms', in The Future of International Relations, eds Neumann and Wæver, 4; Lebow, 'Texts, Paradigms, and Political Change', 258-9.
38. See also the discussion of political violence in Hutchings, 'Simone de Beauvoir'.
39. Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1996), 209.
40. Ibid. 177, 206.
41. Quoted from Clare Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms: Rebecca West's Assault on the Limits of "Gerda's Empire" in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon"', South Atlantic Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 77.
42. Quoted from Rollyson, Rebecca West, 212.
43. Rollyson, Rebecca West, 208.
44. Ibid. 11.
45. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms', 87-8.
46. Kathryn Laing, 'Portraying History and Heroism in Rebecca West's The Sentinel', Women's History Review 14, nos 3 and 4 (2005): 521.
47. Felicity Rosslyn Makes an even stronger call for contextualising Black Lamb and Grey Falcon within West's oeuvre: 'unless one knows all the rest of the author's work, it is not so clear what the central thesis is, that Rebecca West was pinning on Yugoslavia'.
48. Felicity Rosslyn, 'Rebecca West, Gerda and the Sense of Process', in Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, eds John B. Allcock and Antonia Young (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991), 102-15, 102.
49. Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), 22.
50. Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 179.
51. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: Vintage, 1993), 8.
52. Brian Hall, 'Life and Letters: Rebecca West's War', The New Yorker, 15 April 1996: 76.
53. Daniele Conversi, 'Moral Relativism and Equidistance in British Attitudes to the War in the Former Yugoslavia', in This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia, eds Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 252.
54. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 47.
55. Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006), 156-64.
56. See also Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 171-84.
57. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 175.
58. Hall, 'Life and Letters', 76.
59. Dunne et al., 'Introduction', vi.
60. Other noteworthy female/feminist texts include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Ow.
61. in fourth place and Karen Blixen's Out of Africa in 58th. Available at: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/ (accessed 5 March 2011).
62. See also E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939.
63. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Papermac, 1993 [1939]).
64. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms'; Rosslyn, 'Rebecca West'; Loretta Stec, 'Female Sacrifice: Gender and Nostalgic Nationalism in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon', in Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism, eds Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde (London: Macmillian Press, 1997).
65. Marina MacKay, 'Immortal Goodness: Ideas of Resurrection in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon', Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 54, no. 3 (2002): 177-96.
66. Peter Wolfe, Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
67. Harold Orel, The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West (London: Macmillan, 1986).
68. Schweizer, Rebecca West.
69. John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, 'Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Outward and Inward Frontiers', in Black Lambs and Grey Falcons, eds Allcock and Young, xv-xxv.
70. John Allcock and Antonia Young even title their book on female travel writers Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travelers in the Balkans.
71. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania
72. Nattie Golubov, 'English Ethical Socialism: Women Writers, Political Ideas and the Public Sphere between the Wars', Women's History Review 14, no. 1 (2005): 33-59.
73. Bernard Schweizer, 'Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile', Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8, no. 2 (2010): 389-407.
74. See, for instance, Margaret Diane Stetz, 'Rebecca West and the Visual Arts', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 8, no. 1 (1989): 43-62.
75. Ann Norton, 'Rebecca West's Ironic Heroine: Beauty as Tragedy in The Judge', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 34, no. 3 (1991): 295-308.
76. Ann Norton, Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 2000).
77. Bonnie Kime Scott, 'Refiguring the Binary, Breaking the Cycle: Rebecca West as Feminist Modernist', Twentieth Century Literature 37, no. 2 (1991): 169-91.
78. Laing, 'Portraying History'.
79. Bernard Schweizer, ed., Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006).
80. Schweizer, 'Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile'.
81. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 87.
82. Ibid., 90, 144.
83. Ibid., 141, 144.
84. West generally uses 'people' rather than 'nation', but as the former is 'a vague and unpractical concept' that usually corresponds to the present 'nation', I have adopted that in the analysis below.
85. See Schweizer, Rebecca West, 90.
86. Laing ('Portraying History', 518) traces them back to West's early unfinished novel The Sentinel, published in 2002.
87. Wolfe, Rebecca West, 130.
88. Schweizer, Rebecca West.
89. Ibid., 3, 83.
90. Ibid., 86.
91. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms'; Rosslyn, 'Rebecca West'; MacKay, 'Immortal Goodness'.
92. West, Black Lamb, 457-8.
93. Ibid., 801-5.
94. Ibid., 783.
95. Ibid., 784.
96. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 93.
97. West, Black Lamb, 785.
98. Ibid., 1019.
99. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms', 82, 90.
100. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 139.
101. West, Black Lamb, 1088.
102. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 155, footnote 3.
103. West, Black Lamb, 1090.
104. For another case of female stoicism,
105. see Jill Steans, 'Revisionist Heroes and Dissident Heroines: Gender, Nation and War in Soviet Films of "the Thaw"', Global Society 24, no. 3 (2010): 412.
106. West, Black Lamb, 4-5.
107. Ibid., 5-6.
108. Ibid., 882
109. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 88, 98, footnote 7.
110. West, Black Lamb, 784-5.
111. Ibid., 882.
112. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 98, footnote 7.
113. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for making this point.
114. West, Black Lamb, 292, 298, 389.
115. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 178.
116. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
117. On the mobilisation of the unveiling of Muslim women in the War on Terror discourse.
118. see Laura J. Shepherd, 'Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post-9/11', International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006): 19-41.
119. Jill Steans, 'Telling Stories about Women and Gender in the War on Terror', Global Society 22, no. 1 (2008): 163.
120. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms', 83.
121. Norton, 'Rebecca West's Ironic Heroine', 299.
122. West, Black Lamb, 3.
123. Ibid., 27, 208.
124. West quoteed in Stetz, 'Rebecca West and the Visual Arts', 60.
125. The question of how West's understanding of art links to the recent literature on the aesthetic turn in IR is worthy of a more thorough discussion than space allows in this context.
126. see also Moore and Shepherd, 'Aesthetics and International Relations'.
127. West, Black Lamb, 55.
128. Ibid., 302.
129. Quoted in Wolfe, Rebecca West, 24.
130. Golubov, 'English Ethical Socialism', 46.
131. West, Black Lamb, 3.
132. Ibid., 1145.
133. MacKay, 'Immortal Goodness', 185.
134. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms', 79.
135. Ibid., 86.
136. West, Black Lamb, 915.
137. Golubov, 'English Ethical Socialism', 38.
138. Golubov describes West's use of caritas and love in the 1930s as 'emotions that are, in some sense, pre-political though may become an inspiration for political action'.
139. ibid., 42.
140. By the time of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, love has become a political, rather than pre-political, concept.
141. West, Black Lamb, 1146.
142. West's anti-pacifism sets her aside, for instance, from Woolf's position in Three Guineas and, contra Susan Sontag in the 1990s, she did not believe that personal experience was a precondition for political agitation.
143. See Youngs, 'Cosmopolitanism and Feminism'.
144. Stephen Chan, 'The Pain of Susan Sontag', Global Society 24, no. 3 (2010): 379.
145. West, Black Lamb, 911.
146. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 10.
147. West, Black Lamb, 1126.
148. Ibid., 1103.
149. Ibid., 1146.
150. Ibid., 1146.
151. MacKay, 'Immortal Goodness'. MacKay argues further that the significance of the theme of resurrection is underscored by West's insistence on witnessing the Easter ritual in Macedonia.
152. West, Black Lamb, 679.
153. Ibid., 679.
154. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 149.
155. West, Black Lamb, 679-80.
156. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 150.
157. Colquitt, 'A Call to Arms', 88.
158. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 89.
159. West, Black Lamb, 215.
160. Ibid., 680.
161. Ibid., 679.
162. Schweizer, 'Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile', 401.
163. Scott, 'Refiguring the Binary', 171.
164. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 142.
165. Schweizer, 'Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile', 400.
166. West, Black Lamb, 38.
167. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 152.
168. West, Black Lamb, 281.
169. For an alternative reading which holds that West 'conceived of identity as unified and stable'.
170. see Schweizer, 'Rebecca West and the Meaning of Exile', 401.
171. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 92-3.
172. Ibid., 92-3.
173. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 179.
174. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 152.
175. Rollyson, Rebecca West, 178.
176. Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
177. Stec, 'Female Sacrifice', 140.
178. Schweizer, Rebecca West, 142-3.
179. Scott, 'Refiguring the Binary', 187.
180. Laing, 'Portraying History', 516.