Elite Ideologies and Popular Support for U.S. Foreign Policies

This article argues that elite policymakers gain broad public support for their foreign policies by drawing upon long-standing ideologies or narratives circulating within U.S. public discourse or culture. These ideologies are the mutually constituent elements of a nationalist self-image that not only helps differentiate Americans from non-Americans, but also serves to justify U.S. hegemonic power. The staying power of ideologies derives from the personification of nations into binary, anthropomorphic figures

Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

Book Reviews

Book Reviews: Edward Bailey of Maui: Teacher & Naturalist, Engineer & Artist by Linda McCullough; How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawaiÿi by Patrick Vinton Kirch; Pacific Gibraltar: U.S.-Japanese Rivalry Over the Annexation of Hawaiÿi, 1885-1898 by William Michael Morgan; Engineering Nature: Water, Development, & the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise by Jessica B. Teisch; Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement Before the UFW: Puerto Rico, Hawaiÿi, California by Dionicio Nodín Valdés; Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaiÿi by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker; Airborne Dreams: "Nisei" Stewardesses adn Pan American World Airways by Christine R. Yan