Preliminary Programme

The proposed paper is a comparative study of two moments of collective violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first relates to an outbreak of racist violence against blacks in the American city of East St Louis, Illinois in 1917 and the second to a moment of anti-Semitic violence on the Ionian island of Corfu in 1891 – around the issue of the so-called 'blood libel'. The aim of this paper is not so much to provide another reconstruction of the events - although key narrative details will be provided. Rather, it is to offer a possible common explanatory framework for these disparate instances of phobic violence by employing a comparative methodology. At first sight these episodes look very different. They clearly occured in very different socio-economic contexts and, in general, sociologists and historians have tended analytically to differentiate racial and anti-semitic violence. Nevertheless the two episodes have sufficient features in common to allow for comparison. First, in both cases, intensifying economic pressures on the participants were a key factor in precipitating the violence. In East St Louis - in a context of burgeoning economic growth, the consolidation of monopoly capital and the imposition of techniques of scientific management nationally - an employers' drive against organized (predominantly white) labour was the occasion for an upsurge in racial hostility. In Corfu, a contrasting economic change - the transition from a bustling colonial entrepot into a peripheral and declining port incorporated into the national entity of Greece - created economic insecurity and saw the heightening of already existing tensions between Christians and Jews leading to explicit manifestations of anti-Semitism. Secondly, recently acquired notions of citizenship and national identity featured in both events. Both black Americans and the Jews of Corfu had recently acquired the rights of citizenship (1866 in the United States and 1864 in Greece) but faced majority communities who sought to deny them the full entitlement of citizenship or who refused to recognize their citizenship as legitimate. The paper will consider, firstly, how images of racial or religious others were constructed by the perpetrators of the violence. For white Americans, popular notions of citizenship were bound up with a sense of white identity and white supremacy, which denied blacks the same entitlement to American citizenship. This aggressive questioning of who was and who was not entitled to consider themselves a citizen was given even greater force at the time of the East St Louis race riot by the fervently patriotic atmosphere surrounding America's entry into the First World War. In Corfu, as in the rest of Greece in the latter half of the nineteenth century irredentism was the dominant ideology and the decisive factor in power politics. This resurgent and aggressive popular nationalism argued for the negation of the right to citizenship for recently emancipated Jewish communities and often resulted in extreme populism and, in the case of Corfu, anti-Semitism. Secondly, the paper will consider how rumour played a role in producing the image of racial or religious others as a threat to the majority population, and thus in somehow lending violence a sense of legitimacy, even triggering that violence in the first place. Thirdly, the paper will analyse the violence itself, paying particular attention to the structural characteristics of the riots, and deploying a distinction between the onlooking crowd and a violent mob core. Citizenship, nationalism, race, religion and socio-economic structure are explored to consider the phenomena of racial and anti-Semitic violence with a view to demonstrating similarities in the structure of the riots. It is our conviction that a comparative analysis of the two seemingly incompatible and previously unexplored events can enhance the study of religious and race riots which have occurred in different contexts, but with the same devastating impact for the people persecuted. (Show less)

The transition from peace to war is often a turbulent time. Nations and communities are confronted with an ‘other’, an enemy state they must face and overcome. Yet more importantly they must also confront themselves: war requires a sharpening of self-definition, a redrawing of the boundaries of community. In England in 1914, much of these wartime discourses of unity and national regeneration were the product of the recruiting platform, the press or the pulpit. England saw itself purged and cleansed by the challenge of war, a challenge which would sweep away the decadence and divisions of Edwardian society. Its most visible symbol was the classes and masses that flocked to join Kitchener’s volunteer army: a nation united in arms.

A consequence of the redrawing of community engendered by this regenerated nation was that some suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the dividing line. England in 1914 was home to a sizeable German community. Many of these were respected local tradesmen, many of them naturalised British citizens. Yet many were to suffer through the rash of anti-German rioting that swept the country in 1914-15.

This paper discusses the anti–German riots in England, beginning with the first days of war in August 1914, in towns such as Peterborough and Keighley, and concludes with the nation-wide ‘Lusitania’ riots of May 1915. Historians such as Panikos Panayi have set the anti-German riots at the beginning of a century of racial violence in Britain. Yet this paper argues that more valuable interpretations of the riots are to be found by looking back from 1914 to longstanding traditions of collective violence in English society.

Through this we can examine continuities with the ‘moral economy’ of eighteenth-century food riots, the robust popular culture of the nineteenth century and the ritualised violence of pre-1914 British politics. Through this we can see that violence of the anti-German riots is largely symbolic - the destruction of property rather than face-to-face physical violence – and became a means of visually demarcating who was included in the new wartime community. In this it differs greatly from the primarily physical violence of the race riots of 1919 directed against Africans and Caribbeans in England. Disowned by mainstream media and public opinion, the anti-German riots were nevertheless a product of the radical shift in the boundaries of community caused by the outbreak of war.

The paper is based on in depth case studies of riots from local and national press accounts, and is drawn from a doctoral study on the response to war in England in 1914-15. (Show less)

This paper would study the way American comics reflected and reactioned to three international crises. It is going to analyze how the comic heroes and villains acted during World War II, Vietnam War and September, the 11th. The paper should do research into what did these comics show of those three conflicts and how did they do it. This study could be a good way to learn what did Public Opinion want to know about those conflicts. Or even, what did they want their children to know about those trascendental crises. (Show less)