Recht
Refine
Document Type
- Journal Article (5)
- Online Publication (5)
Language
- English (10) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (10)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (10)
UNRRA (1943-1947) was an international organization that coordinated relief for victims of the Second World War in areas liberated from Axis control. Existing historical scholarship has put an unbalanced emphasis on global post-war reconstruction: European experiences have attracted much attention whereas scholars pay little attention to non-Western cases, with a few exceptions such as Japan. For long, not only in Western media, but also in Chinese historical scholarship, China has been either regarded as a passive recipient of international humanitarianism, or has simply been overlooked. But looking at UNRRA in China provides us with an opportunity to investigate how non-Western actors and motivations could shape a transnational humanitarian project, in a way different from European cases.
Rereading a book is always an uncanny experience in multiple temporalities. If the linguistic turn has taught us anything, it is that the context of reading shapes the meaning of the text that is read. The historicist impulse to reconstruct the original context on the basis of the text itself is at best an asymptotic, at worst a quixotic, pursuit. Yet texts remain, some more so than others. Those texts which continue to be read and reread long after their original context has passed we call ‘classics’. This is a term most frequently applied to literature, of course, but also to philosophy and other scholarly works animated by a generalising impulse. It pertains to works, in other words, which lay claim to a significance transcending their original context. It is rarely applied to works whose principle value is empirical or narrowly scholarly. These are presumed to be only temporarily useful interventions into an ongoing scholarly debate, in which later works draw on and ‘supersede’ the insights of earlier ones, rendering their predecessors superfluous. (Rather the reverse of Jove and his children.) Consequently, relatively few works of historical scholarship are considered classics in the full sense. History’s emphasis on the particular, its frequent skepticism of theoretical generalisations, and its embrace of archival empiricism have all tended to preclude the emergence of a broad canon of ‘historical classics’. There have, however, been exceptions to this rule.