The American people revolted against British Empire policies to govern the American colonies in a more civilized and peaceful way by an effective government. With the successful independence, however, the United States of America needed to join the moral community of the sovereign states as Carl Schmitt called Jus Publicum Europaeum. In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine worked as an American manifesto to be independent from European morals.

The United States of America had to establish herself as a treaty-worthy nation in the Jus Publicum Europaeum by fulfilling international duties. For that purpose the United States as a sovereign state was required to accomplish the national unity defeating any independent authorities and rebellious groups within their land. In addition to that, the American government was expected to govern the people, following the civilized standard to keep the peace and order based on reasonable rules of law despite their burning pioneer spirit. The establishment of the Federal Constitution had given her a foundation of a full membership of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. But the fragile republic was not yet able to control their northwestern and southern territories against the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the native nations such as Seminole, Creek or Shawnee.

The fact that the United States actually concluded the Jay Treaty with Great Britain and resolved the quasi-war against France proved her treaty-worthiness. To the United States the War of 1812 made the final test of independence and dignity in the international community. The Treaty of Ghent and the victory at New Orleans confirmed the United States position in the powers and assured the national unity so that European states respected the American sovereignty to sever the friendly relationship with and military supports to the Indian nations. Shutting out foreign involvements, the Americans moved rapidly westward, destroying and removing the native people as they had intended at the time of the Revolution.

European powers’ recognition of the United States as an equal partner brought her a favorable position in the US-Spanish negotiation to settle Florida, Louisiana, and the Northwest territories to be a successor to the Spanish Empire. The Transcontinental Treaty set the United States the central figure in dealing with the problems of the land appropriation in the Northwestern territories and of the independence movements in Spanish American colonies.

With these successes and confidence the President James Monroe’s annual message made the audacious doctrine to Europe: European non-colonization and non-involvement of Americas, and American disentanglement from Europe. Even though the doctrine was a radical challenge to the European principles of the international relationship, it did not necessitate the United States any actions. The actual situations including independence movements in the Western Hemisphere urged little European involvements. Without responding to immediate necessities the doctrine could turn into a manifesto to extoll the superiority of the American System independent from the Jus Publicum Europaeum. The manifesto authorized, and praised the American liberty of rugged individualism.

Since its articulation in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was never given a single definition. Its definition depended largely on the historical context: U.S. policymakers defined the doctrine in a way that justified the foreign policy objectives they pursued. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was no exception. His administration’s foreign policy was designed to fundamentally transform U.S. relations with other nations, first within the Western Hemisphere and then across the Atlantic. The Monroe Doctrine was instrumental in effecting these transformations. This article examines the way FDR, in the period 1933 to 1941, employed the nineteenth-century doctrine to pursue his foreign policy goals in the context of the Good Neighbor Policy (GNP) and World War II.

Concurrent with the launch of the domestic New Deal, FDR launched the Good Neighbor Policy toward other American nations. Giving up the right of intervention, the GNP marked the decisive end of the U.S.’s openly imperialistic policy in the Western Hemisphere. However, the Monroe Doctrine, which had long served as the basis for such imperialistic policy, was still in place, and served as a reminder of U.S. imperialism. From the U.S. perspective, the freedom of unilateral military action implied by the Monroe Doctrine was so vital to national security it could not be relinquished. Thus, a challenge for the FDR administration was to eliminate the imperialistic implications of the Monroe Doctrine without revoking the doctrine itself. In fact, other American nations attempted to pan-Americanize the Monroe Doctrine. Insisting that the Monroe Doctrine was a national policy, the FDR administration avoided international discussion on it. Later, Western Hemisphere nations agreed on the concept of hemisphere-based collective security without referring to the Monroe Doctrine, which was the first major articulation of such a concept.

During the late 1930s, a fierce debate raged in the United States over whether the country should participate in World War II. FDR and the isolationists decisively disagreed on what needed to be done to defend the United States and, by extension, the Western Hemisphere. Both sides used the Monroe Doctrine to justify their position. The isolationists invoked the traditional definition of the Monroe Doctrine, which was based on political separation between the hemispheres. To refute the isolationist position, FDR offered a reading of the Monroe Doctrine he claimed was more in tune with twentieth-century realities. FDR declared that isolation could no longer protect democratic American institutions from an un-American system; “essential” differences between democracy and totalitarianism rather compelled the United States to intervene to preserve its democratic institutions. FDR did not lead the United States into war, but he called for and implemented actions with the risk of war with Germany before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In his attempts to formulate a new international role for the United States in the mid-twentieth century, FDR fundamentally redefined the Monroe Doctrine without claiming to do so. Relying on the “redefined” Monroe Doctrine, FDR succeeded in presenting his policy not as a deviation from tradition but as its extension.

This article highlights the characteristics of the Monroe Doctrine that are the roots of both American unilateralism and multilateralism. It achieves this objective by examining the utilization of the Monroe Doctrine by the United States to justify its interventionist policies in the Americas since its declaration in 1823 and traces its development over time as a justification for individual or collective intervention.

As Gaddis Smith, a prominent historian of U.S. foreign policy, stated in 1994, the end of the Cold War seems to have put an end to “the last years of the Monroe Doctrine.” Actually, we rarely see the words of the Monroe Doctrine in American interventions any longer, especially those of the last two decades, including the recent statements by President Obama on his decision to begin a new military intervention against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. However, looking back on the history of the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. interventions, it is evident that this doctrine still continues to affect American policies even today. The validity of this assertion is confirmed by contemporary interventions, which as in the past, are marked by the problem of whether the U.S. can undertake these actions unilaterally or multilaterally, that is, the very problem that it had to confront in the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, long before the end of the Cold War.

It is true that many scholars, especially those who study the history of the Monroe Doctrine and U.S-Latin American relations, have already argued that the doctrine relates not only to American unilateralism but also to its multilateralism. However, few articles explicitly regard the Monroe Doctrine as the ideational source of both unilateralism and multilateralism and clarify its historic development to the present day, which ultimately created the multilateral framework. In addition, generally speaking, the Monroe Doctrine is still only usually associated with U.S. unilateralism, while the effect of the doctrine on the development of multilateralism has been ignored. For this reason, this article promotes a more rigorous understanding of the role that the Monroe Doctrine has played in creating the two core principles of U.S. behavior.

This paper addresses the following issues: (1) President Monroe’s declaration of the original Monroe Doctrine, (2) the Roosevelt Corollary as the transformed Monroe Doctrine for U.S. interventions, (3) the trial of and backlash

against the multilateralizing of the Monroe Doctrine under the Wilson administration, (4) the multilateralized, Monroe Doctrine from the 1930s’ Good Neighbor policy to the establishment of the United Nations, (5) the Monroe Doctrine during the Cold War, and (6) the effect of the Monroe Doctrine on U.S. interventionism in the post-Cold War era.

As the bicentennial of the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine approaches, it is astonishing to see the contrast between the understanding of the Monroe Doctrine almost a hundred years ago and that of the present-day United States. The complacent applause of the Doctrine at its centennial gave way to the detachment of American society from it and its critical reexamination in academia.

Interestingly, this kind of critical, if not thorough, examination of the Monroe Doctrine was preceded not just by scholars in Latin America, a region in which the United States frequently used the Doctrine as a pretext for intervention, but also by Japanese scholars whose government advocated the Asian Monroe Doctrine before and during World War II. During the 1930s and the early 1940s, the Monroe Doctrine was a favorite topic of Japanese intellectuals as their government pursued what it termed a “New Order in East Asia” and the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Area” with the goal of creating an “Asia for Asians.” The vision clashed with U.S. Open Door policy toward China.

Tachi Sakutaro, a specialist in international law, Kamikawa Hikomatsu, one of the founders of the field of international relations in Japan, and other Japanese scholars have been quite critical of the Monroe Doctrine. Their points, at least superficially, are similar to those of today’s American scholars who focus upon the unilateral and imperial traits of the Doctrine. Tachi, Kamikawa, and others, however, did not seem to grasp the tendency of American foreign policy to lean increasingly toward Pan-Americanism and collective security in the interwar years. On the other hand, a few intellectuals such as Yokota Kisaburo, international law professor and a former student of Tachi, Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a harsh critic of Japan’s foreign policy, and Takagi Yasaka, a founder of the field of American Studies in Japan, belong to a decided minority of scholars who have taken issue with the Asian Monroe Doctrine and inquired into what the Monroe Doctrine really meant to the United States of the time. These scholars, nonetheless, did seem to understand the American vision of international order better than those Japanese ones who criticized the Doctrine.

Japanese scholars who criticized the Monroe Doctrine made some penetrating remarks concerning its traits, which preceded the contemporary reexamination of the Doctrine by American scholars. But it was the vision of those who opposed the Asian Monroe Doctrine and gave a balanced appraisal of the Doctrine that paved the way for the merger of the two visions of the international order in Japan and the United States after the Pacific War.

Although the Cold War in Asia may have been the primary factor in the making of U.S.-Japan alliance, the merger of the two visions of international order was the underlying cause of the postwar cooperation between the United States and Japan.

The Monroe Doctrine (hereafter the “MD”) that divides the world into two hemispheres, first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, has continually been updated with flexibility even after the 20th century as needed by changes in foreign policies. It is through these series of applications that the United States has secured its global hegemony up to the present while regulating its propensity toward unilateralism. On the other hand, as a response to such U.S.-led globalization, American literary studies have been urged into parting with disciplinary isolationism. There is a great demand for new approaches that allow us to question the word “American” by moving it beyond the nation state.

In light of recent hemispheric studies with a critical perspective toward the imperialistic MD, this essay explores three novels from the 1980s by considering the relation between the U.S. and Latin America: the former’s control of the latter under the pretense of protecting the Western Hemisphere. As an implication of the way in which cultural representations of drugs can be used in explaining the war on drugs targeted at Bolivia in the Reagan Era, I shall first examine Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) to reveal the shades of Latin America behind the domestic story set in New York. In particular, the rhetoric of family values in President Reagan’s anti-drug campaign in partnership with the First Lady will contribute to a better analysis of the easily-overlooked images of Latin America that feature in the opening scene, which unfolds into the protagonist’s self-exiled trip induced by cocaine abuse.

The second exemplification of Latin American representation can be found in Continental Drift (1985) by Russell Banks, partly set in the Caribbean sea which has been an informal part of the U.S. since MD. This “crossroads narrative” alternates between the perspectives of a typical middle-class American man and a Haitian proletarian woman, but of particular relevance here is the dominating meta-narrative over the two, where the narrator situates both human migration and the Earth’s crustal movement in one cooperative system- a planet. A close analysis of this “spheric” vision inspired by the theory of continental drift, will provide a framework for re-examining MD’s “hemi”-spheric division.

More radically connected with the questioning of America is Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach (1986) in asserting that the idea of the American Dream should be re-examined in a wider geographical setting, covering not only South America but also the Eastern Hemisphere-the Old World as the point of origin for the New World. It is at this moment that the demarcation of MD is open for discussion with reference to the origin, beginning and ending of the American dream. Here, the shades of Latin America are shown in the indigenous girl’s navigating waters in order for American males to cross the border. In addition, when we focus on the fact that the narrative of magical realism, which characterizes this North American novel, originated in Latin America, here emerges another issue: the redefinition of literary magical realism in a hemispheric context.

This essay uses the geographic language of the Monroe Doctrine to explore the spatial paradigm shift that transpired in African American literature in the twentieth century. The Monroe Doctrine is grounded in the idea of separable hemispheres and continents, the “basic” global divisions that have long been taken for granted. The spatial ordering of the world, which is divided into Eastern and Western Hemispheres, Europe and America, “Old World” and “New World,” is a resilient paradigm perpetuated by the long-accepted Atlantic-centered codification of the Mercator projection. It is this view of the world in which African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance critically intervene.

As my subjects in this essay, I have chosen James Weldon Johnson and Walter White―the first and second executive secretaries of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)―whose international travels afford significant insight into the geography of African American literature. Johnson, known as the “Renaissance man” of the Harlem Renaissance, participated in the implementation of Big Stick diplomacy in Nicaragua in 1912 under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), Johnson justified the occupation of Nicaragua by the US Marines as having been dictated by the Japanese threat to construct a canal across the isthmus to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Caribbean and thereby bring spatial reorientation. Furthermore, Johnson’s autobiography registers a spatial reframing of the Pacific that occurred in the 1920s. Johnson was the first African American delegate of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an organization that advocated the concept of the Pacific Community. It envisaged a Pacific-centered perspective on the world, transforming the region from the periphery of Europe to a central stage in international politics―a shift that is symbolized by a map entitled “The Pacific Region” in the proceedings of the second biennial conference of the IPR. Drawn using Goode’s projection, which challenged the distortions perpetuated by the Mercator projection, the map represented a Pacific region comprised of Pacific Rim countries, placing Asian countries on the western shores and the United States and Latin American countries on the eastern shores. I suggest that this spatial reorientation had a significant bearing on the way Johnson’s memory of the Monroe Doctrine in Nicaragua was modified in relation to Japan’s military occupation of Manchuria across the Pacific.

The equator-based Mercator projection rapidly lost its narrative power during World War II. Instead, an innovative cartography adopting an aerial perspective―popularized by the cartographic artist Richard Edes Harrison and his “One World, One War” map (1941)―represented America’s fresh world outlook. Bringing into question the earth’s division into separate hemispheres, and providing a salutary reminder of the Earth’s sphericity and continuity, it ushered in what Alan K. Henrikson has termed “air-age globalism.” Walter White, a pioneer African American globetrotter, navigated in this mutating spatial context. An accredited war correspondent, White flew in the aerial Atlantic world that the US Army Air Transport Command (ATC) created. He investigated the Jim Crow that “flew” to the European and North African theaters with the mobilization of the US military, which resulted in his war report A Rising Wind (1945). In the Pacific theater, White made a 36,000-mile, island-hopping tour with the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS); US forces used Pacific Islands for the military tactics of leapfrogging, building airstrips and integrating military operations using aircraft. Flying the global networks of ATC and NATS, White drew a black version of “One World, One War,” reshaping the language of freedom and “bondage” in Mercator’s maritime world plied by slave ships.

“Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) is one of the Hawthorne’s earliest tales, combining actual history and imagination, in a style later termed Romance. Although based on “Lovewell’s Fight” in 1725, the battle between the colonial farmers of Massachusetts and Pigwacket Indians, Hawthorne eliminates the bloody battle scene itself, and instead traces Reuben Bourne’s subsequent life over eighteen years, focusing especially on his psychological aftermath of the Indian fight. Reuben’s mental downfall is caused by his failure to fulfill his promise to bury Roger Malvin, Reuben’s comrade as well as father-in-law-to-be. This paper explores a parallel relation between the function and the meaning of “burial” not only in the fictional/private sphere, but also the real public/national space in the early period of America’s history.

The 19th century was a time when leading personalities and major historical events became objects of commemorative veneration. Communities began to construct memorial monuments and rituals came to play in the public sphere in order to support their memory through a system of “group confirmation.” Confronting contemporary writers’ and community’s admiration of “Lovewell’s Fight,” Hawthorne’s narrative uses the imaginary survivor’s memory to function as the “counter-memory” of national discourse. Reuben’s story depicts what the community repressed and through this family romance, the relation of Roger and Rueben reflects the perspective that contemporary community conceive.

Reuben’s mental deterioration is explored here through reference to Philip Freneau’s poem “The Indian Burying Ground” (1787), and Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). Whereas critics of Freneau’s poem discussed the resemblance between Roger’s final bodily position and Native American burials, the focus here is on the typical western way of burial described in his poem, “the posture, that we give the dead,” that is for a living person to lay the dead down in the ground. By acting contrary to this tradition―raising the dying man up to lean against the rock―Reuben fails to accept Roger’s death, which his psychological fear later conjures up the uncanny Roger’s ghost and his voice. Furthermore, an examination of Freud’s theory of Mourning and Melancholia, the normal reactions to the loss of a loved one, can be used to account for Reuben’s downfall. His long-term depression illustrates the melancholia trait where the acceptance of loss is never achieved, and in particular where the patient desires to be cast out and punished. It might therefore be concluded that the collapse of Reuben’s family results from a lack of proper burial of the dead.

Consequently, this tragic family incident mirrors the theme of America’s national destiny. Gary Laderman suggests that burial was considered a public act to promote a national unity in the colonial period. By ensuring the dead had an appropriate burial, colonial communities negotiated the boundary between nature and culture, with attachment to the dead and location of their burial justifying the rational discourse for control over the land. In the text, however, the narrative of Roger’s unaccomplished burial, Hawthorne leaves this role to the contemporary reader outside of the text, who is still not reconciled with their collective guilt of their forefathers. Through this work it is suggested that just as Reuben lost his future generation through his son’s death, so too will America without a proper burial of its historical past.

This paper traces in Sarah Josepha Hale’s two editions of her novel Northwood (first published in 1827, and second in 1852), her ideological transition from Enlightenment republicanism to Victorian ideology, and examines “benevolence” as a feminized influence. Hale was best known as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read women’s magazine of its day. This position enabled her for almost half a century to espouse the doctrine of separate spheres; Hale was one of major figures who exerted a profound influence on the gender ideology and white, middle-class women’s culture of Victorian America.

The idea of a “woman’s sphere” whose prescriptions advised women to stay out of affairs, was once thought to reflect reality, but it is now recognized as a rhetorical construct or discursive formations. As many studies have shown, a number of while women in the antebellum era amply demonstrated their rise to political consciousness by their active participation in social reforms. Hale did encourage them, trying to expand female influence on American society. Why, then, did Hale advocate the “spheres”?

An explanation for this contradiction can be found in the cultural shift away from post-Revolutionary Enlightenment and towards Victorian notions. Hale’s writings before the 1830s reveal a grounding in the concept of republican patriotism and Enlightenment values, which defined woman as a rational being, on the same social plateau as man. She continued to rely on certain virtues of republicanism, but gradually “converted” to Victorian notions which emphasized sexual difference, and after the 1830s to the idea of gendered separate spheres. The early nineteenth century was indeed in the midst of the upheavals in social, political, and economic systems, and the nation came to be perceived as one threatened by chaotic competition or “corruption.” Woman thereupon was redefined as man’s opposite and alternative: a spiritual and moral being, free from corruption, while man was regarded as materialistic and “corrupt” because of his presence in the political/commercial domain. The “woman’s sphere” that Hale secured for antebellum women, therefore, was an insistence on the difference in gender based on morality and spirituality.

Hale’s strong belief in spirituality inspired her to publicize in writing her political consciousness, but no one has yet clarified what she meant by it. The two texts of Northwood infer that it be seen as a synonym for evangelical benevolence, which indicated “helping the poor” or, people would then have it, “doing good” as an inheritance from “Republican Mothers.” In the first edition, Hale equates “charity” with republican benevolence, which expresses an impulse to administer personal service; it engages individuals in direct acts of compassion and connectivity with other people. In the second text, however, her usage of benevolence is gendered and altered from republican charity to Victorian philanthropy. This stance enabled Hale to declare a political solution to slavery (in her case, the colonization of Liberia), and provided her with a rationale for white women to enter the public sphere. With philanthropy as a collective form of gendered benevolence, Hale advanced “woman’s influence” and encouraged white women of impeccable social standing to act as crusaders in the age of “Benevolent Empire.“

“The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, “Herman Melville’s novella, is a set of literary miscellanies comprising ten descriptive sketches of the Galapagos Islands that are located on the equator in the Pacific Ocean. The narrator calls these islands “a group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles.” In this thesis, I address the power of the metaphoric world of “Gallipagos” (Melville’s selection of the Spanish name of the islands) as “relics” that rebel against the imperialistic current toward expansion in the Western Hemisphere, a current that was prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century America and was driven by the Monroe Doctrine. “Gallipagos” places a counterproductive value on the relics left on the islands and resists the notions of expansion and advancement.

The relics on these abandoned islands include “hermitages and stone basins,” post offices consisting of “stake and bottle” and “grave-stones” left by buccaneers and hermits who once inhabited the islands. These relics exemplify the “signs of vanishing humanity” on this barren territory. Similar to the concept of “souvenir” as discussed by Yunte Huang, relics “turn the human gaze back to the past, not the future.” Souvenir and relics jeopardize both the “development of human productive force and the progress of teleological history” that commodities represent. In the sketches of this novella, the relics in the islands resist the future-oriented current of mid-nineteenth-century America.

The term “Gallipagos” may refer to the islands themselves or to the species of tortoise that inhabits these islands. These two implications reveal the realities beyond the description of the sketches. The Gallipagos islands are described as the “Apple of Sodom, ruddiness and ashes, life and death.” The tortoises have a similar duality; the narrator depicts tortoises as “one inky blot” and points out at their possibility of turning “both black and bright.” Both of “Gallipagos” are traces of the past, and they have the duality in them. I will examine the two Gallipagos referents in the context of this duality, as relics in the distant sea.

The narrator invites his readers to visualize the equator. He asks, “Did you ever lay eye on the real genuine Equator? Have you ever, in the largest sense, toed the Line? ” Then he depicts the headland of the islands, which is divided by the equator as if one is cutting “through the centre of a pumpkin pie.” Here, the reader becomes a holder of a knife, and the equator, an imaginary line, is visualized and realized in a metaphorical way within the text. The reader and the narrator, who suffer an “optical delusion” of the Enchanted Isles, see a “burning in live letters” such as “Memento***” on the back of a tortoise. As Marvin Fisher points out, this is not a memento mori but a memento vitae (memory of life). The relics reverse the duality contained in the two meanings of Gallipagos, taking on its past-oriented force. The islands that stand both as a “burial in the ocean” and a sentry “in a pure necessity of seafaring life,” enhance the “distant beauty” floating in the Pacific.

This paper explores the meaning of Frederick Douglass’s turnabout on his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in relation to his changing view on th,e legitimacy of slave rebellion. Until 1851 Douglass saw the Constitution as a proslavery document that sanctioned slavery. In 1851 he suddenly reversed his opinion and began to argue that the Constitution was an antislavery instrument―that it, in fact, outlawed the institution of human bondage. Douglass did not arrive at this new position easily, for he initially worried that such an interpretation would ignore the intent of the framers. Douglass was not sure if he could give the Constitution a meaning that he knew was not the design of the framers and the Founding Fathers. He considered that to do so would be doing disservice to those whom he regarded as father figures to emulate. As an ex-slave desiring liberty for his fellow slaves, Douglass looked upon the Founding Fathers as roll models because they were rebels who won their freedom and independence with their own hands. Douglass considered rebellion a right for oppressed individuals. In fact, part of the reason that he was initially against the Constitution was because he thought that it protected slavery by prohibiting slave insurrection, by denying the very right of rebellion to slaves.

When Douglass changed his opinion on the Constitution and came to espouse it, he also reversed his attitude toward slave rebellion and began to repudiate it as a way to abolish slavery. Determined to adhere to the Constitution, the highest law of the land, Douglass saw that social change can best be effectuated through legal means. This complete about face was made possible through a simple realization that the Constitution is a written document, that it is what its words say. Douglass no longer saw the intent of the framers as the authoritative voice that constrains the meaning of this legal document.

Douglass’s new vision of the Constitution was also an expression of the democratic aim of his abolitionist philosophy in two ways. First, by declaring that the Constitution is what is written, Douglass emphasized that any literate persons can form their own opinion on Constitutional issues, thereby democratically opening its interpretation to common people. Second, by arguing that paying attention to the words of the Constitution inevitably leads one to look closely at the objects that it states, Douglass presented a forward-looking model of legal interpretation, in which not the past (the intent of the framers) but the future (objects) serves as the interpretive principle. Such a view was in harmony with Douglass’s characterization of a slave as “a creature of the present and the past” that is deprived of the future. By maintaining that on should read the words of the Constitution and look to its objects―what it was designed to achieve in the future―to see its antislavery nature, Douglass envisioned for all slaves “a future with a hope in it,” a future when slavery would be abolished.

Osa Helen Johnson (1894-1953) was a female explorer famous for providing information about tbe homemaking techniques and life of the natives and wild animals of Africa. Osa had opportunities to go to the Solomon Islands and Borneo, after marrying Martin Elmer Johnson (1884-1937), an explorer and filmmaker. They made motion pictures in both areas and showed them in the United States. Carl E. Akeley, a prominent naturalist, recommended the Johnsons as members of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, which had been promoting the construction of an African Hall in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt.

From 1924 to 1927, the expedition party including Martin and Osa stayed at Lake Paradise which is located some 450 miles north of Nairobi, British East Africa. After returning from Africa, Martin and Osa completed the film Simba: The King of Beasts; A Saga of the Africa Veldt (1928), which featured wild animals, various tribes, and lion hunting. In addition to taking motion pictures, Osa sought ways to perform American-style housework in Africa where modem convenience was extremely limited compared to the United States. Her interests coincided with the popularization of home economics and the industrialization of housework, which progressed rapidly in the United States in the early 20th century.

The first section covers Johnson’s career prior to becoming an explorer, background information concerning exploration at that time, and the making of the film Simba. The second section examines how Osa’s deep interest in housework, the development of home economics, and improvements in the status of women overlap. It seems that women’s social progress and home-centeredness are confrontational trends; however, Osa’s household activities during her exploration suggests the two trends actually have a complicit relationship. The third section considers the implications of consumption activities that were introduced to Africa. Osa’s housework practice transformed Africa from a place of hunting to one of consumption, which reveals both the achievement of modernization and the limitations of large-scale consumption that had also been felt keenly in the United States in the 1920s.

Osa’s practice shows the bright side of Africa, just like Akeley attempted to show through taxidermy. Housework in Africa indirectly referred to the social problems that the United States had been facing, such as pollution of the living environment, the high complexity of the economy, and the deterioration of race relations. In this sense, it can be said that finding the “brightness” in Africa and recognizing the “darkness” in the United States were linked inseparably. A hidden connection between everyday housework practices and U.S. imperialism is one more conclusion of this study. Osa’s efforts were intended to manage domestic life in the American way even during hunting trips in Africa. The replication of American life in Africa partly supposes to praise U.S. imperialism, which aims to be a hegemony of other countries without the invasion of territory; at the same time, it critically refers to social problems of the United States that have gradually occurred at the expense of modernization.

Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace appeared in 1982, right in the middle of the race for nuclear developments between the United States and the Soviet Union. It depicts a future world after a nuclear war; yet to think about a nuclear war is to “think the unthinkable” because a nuclear war has never happened and we have never gone through it. When the unprecedented nuclear war is described, it tends to be related with other preceded images of catastrophe. As a result, its alterity is preoccupied, assimilated, and domesticated in order to invent a fiction of a nuclear war. A nuclear war is, in Jacques Derrida’s words, so “fabulously textual” that it could hypothetically be analogized, with a familiar precedent, and misread and described in dependence on the existing discourses.

The opening sentence of God’s Grace is “This is that story,” which suggests “that story” exists even before “this story;” we should read the narration as well as the story of this novel. God’s Grace is not simply a story of the eschatology (this story) but also a meta-narrative of eschatological discourses (that story). It contains a variety of elements in human history, such as colonialism, patriarchy, rivalries among tribes and religions, and so forth. Necessarily, what the author was able to narrate so as to represent the “unthinkable” world after a nuclear war had to be representations of the existing historical precedents that could be invented only through the existing discourses.

Among many examples of the historical precedents, gender and sexuality play important roles in God’s Grace. The wombs of female characters have much to do not only with the patriarchal system before the nuclear war but also with the binary world system during the Cold War. Reading sexual politics is indispensable to interpret God’s Grace as an eschatological fiction, for it bears on both the extinction and the rebirth of human beings.

The future images in God’s Grace are nothing less than representations of the past from the beginning of the world to the annihilation of human beings. The characters only perform and represent the human history that will end up with the nuclear catastrophe. The repetition of the past seems to be ineluctable. However, the novel’s very last scene suggests a radical change in its textuality and temporality when a gorilla begins to pray. The gorilla’s prayer represents, in a Jewish sense, a return to the past when human errors and wickedness have yet to be occurred. The end of the story is a warning to the present situation in which a nuclear war would be inevitable in the near future.