Logics of Affordability and Worth: Gendered Consumption in Rural Uganda

This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled

Cultural Policy in a Time of War: The American Response to Endangered Books in World War II

For the first time in U.S. history, the protection of books and other cultural resources became an official war aim during World War II. Examining the broad historical process by which this policy was formed and executed, this article focuses on three key factors: the new role of intellectual and cultural elites, who forged close ties with the state; the expansion of intelligence gathering and its unintended consequences for the preservation of cultural material; and the extraordinary actions of individual librarians, curators, and ordinary soldiers on the ground, who improvised solutions to the problems of preservation and restoration.published or submitted for publicatio

Excerpt from Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

Kathy Peiss knocks the established literature akilter in her study of the zoot suit. This flashy, over-the-top garb of the 1940s has long been studied as a uniform of hipsters and pachucos in the United States, who were targeted for violent repression by white police and servicemen in the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles. Peiss audaciously opens up her study to discuss the signifier of the zoot suit internationally. In a tour de force, she outlines the sense of cultural identity fostered among zoot suiters and allied long-coat wearers, as well as the political meanings assigned to them, in such diverse places as Mexico, Trinidad, South Africa, and the USSR during the 1940s

Excerpt from Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

Kathy Peiss knocks the established literature akilter in her study of the zoot suit. This flashy, over-the-top garb of the 1940s has long been studied as a uniform of hipsters and pachucos in the United States, who were targeted for violent repression by white police and servicemen in the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles. Peiss audaciously opens up her study to discuss the signifier of the zoot suit internationally. In a tour de force, she outlines the sense of cultural identity fostered among zoot suiters and allied long-coat wearers, as well as the political meanings assigned to them, in such diverse places as Mexico, Trinidad, South Africa, and the USSR during the 1940s

Excerpt from <i>Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style</i>

Kathy Peiss knocks the established literature akilter in her study of the zoot suit. This flashy, over-the-top garb of the 1940s has long been studied as a uniform of hipsters and pachucos in the United States, who were targeted for violent repression by white police and servicemen in the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles. Peiss audaciously opens up her study to discuss the signifier of the zoot suit internationally. In a tour de force, she outlines the sense of cultural identity fostered among zoot suiters and allied long-coat wearers, as well as the political meanings assigned to them, in such diverse places as Mexico, Trinidad, South Africa, and the USSR during the 1940s

Session 7: Universalism and War

Alistair Black, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign All information flows toward it, or returns to it in a form worked up into shape : The Intelligence Branch and Libraries of the British War Office, 1873-1914 Intelligence has always been an aspect of organized warfare. It was not until the 1873, however, that the British Army effectively recognised this formally by establishing a dedicated division, under the auspices of the War Office, named the Intelligence Branch, whose work was to be supported by collections of printed materials in libraries spread across a number of locations. Based on documents held in the National Archives (UK), this paper explores the ways in which the work of the War Office Intelligence Branch developed before the First World War in response to imperial and foreign-military challenges. Specifically, attention is paid to the type of information management methods that were employed. Significantly, these methods pre-dated those that emerged around the turn of the century in the first large multinational corporations, in counter-intelligence agencies like MI5 (1908) and in the Board of Trade, which inaugurated a Commercial Intelligence Branch in 1899. They also pre-dated, though subsequently paralleled, the late-nineteenth century emergence of a science of management, which included an identifiable information dimension. Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania Information as Warfare: The American Transformation of the Internationalist Vision in WWII Americans participated in the internationalist information movement of the interwar years, albeit with their own quirks and obsessions, especially a strange faith in microfilm. The descent into the Second World War exposed the weaknesses of the internationalist vision and resistances to universalization: the international book trade ended, scholarly exchange broke down, and nations concealed information to make war. In the United States, the first civilian intelligence agency, the Coordinator of Information--soon renamed the Office of Strategic Services--gathered librarians, archivists, and scholars to establish storage and retrieval systems for classified information. Strikingly, these were not primarily leading documentalists or scientists, but rather experts in the social sciences and humanities; their prior experience lay in Ivy League universities, research libraries, and New Deal cultural programs. Out of the wartime experience, a specifically American (and nationalist) version of internationalism and information emerged

Session 7: Universalism and War

Alistair Black, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign All information flows toward it, or returns to it in a form worked up into shape : The Intelligence Branch and Libraries of the British War Office, 1873-1914 Intelligence has always been an aspect of organized warfare. It was not until the 1873, however, that the British Army effectively recognised this formally by establishing a dedicated division, under the auspices of the War Office, named the Intelligence Branch, whose work was to be supported by collections of printed materials in libraries spread across a number of locations. Based on documents held in the National Archives (UK), this paper explores the ways in which the work of the War Office Intelligence Branch developed before the First World War in response to imperial and foreign-military challenges. Specifically, attention is paid to the type of information management methods that were employed. Significantly, these methods pre-dated those that emerged around the turn of the century in the first large multinational corporations, in counter-intelligence agencies like MI5 (1908) and in the Board of Trade, which inaugurated a Commercial Intelligence Branch in 1899. They also pre-dated, though subsequently paralleled, the late-nineteenth century emergence of a science of management, which included an identifiable information dimension. Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania Information as Warfare: The American Transformation of the Internationalist Vision in WWII Americans participated in the internationalist information movement of the interwar years, albeit with their own quirks and obsessions, especially a strange faith in microfilm. The descent into the Second World War exposed the weaknesses of the internationalist vision and resistances to universalization: the international book trade ended, scholarly exchange broke down, and nations concealed information to make war. In the United States, the first civilian intelligence agency, the Coordinator of Information--soon renamed the Office of Strategic Services--gathered librarians, archivists, and scholars to establish storage and retrieval systems for classified information. Strikingly, these were not primarily leading documentalists or scientists, but rather experts in the social sciences and humanities; their prior experience lay in Ivy League universities, research libraries, and New Deal cultural programs. Out of the wartime experience, a specifically American (and nationalist) version of internationalism and information emerged