A new world a new American foreign policy: the Carter administration, Nicaragua, and the legacy of the Vietnam War, 1977-1981

The impact of the Vietnam War conditioned the Carter administration’s response to the Nicaraguan revolution in ways that reduced US engagement with both sides of the conflict. It made the countries of Latin America counter the US approach and find their own solution to the crisis, and allowed Cuba to play a greater role in guiding the overthrow of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. This thesis re-evaluates Carter’s policy through the legacy of the Vietnam War, because US executive anxieties about military intervention, Congress’s increasing influence, and US public concerns about the nation’s global responsibilities, shaped the Carter approach to Nicaragua. Following a background chapter, the Carter administration’s policy towards Nicaragua is evaluated, before and after the fall of Somoza in July 1979. The extent of the Vietnam influence on US-Nicaraguan relations is developed by researching government documents on the formation of US policy, including material from the Jimmy Carter Library, the Library of Congress, the National Security Archive, the National Archives and Records Administration, and other government and media sources from the United Nations Archives, New York University, the New York Public Library, the Hoover Institution Archives, Tulane University and the Organization of American States. The thesis establishes that the Vietnam legacy played a key role in the Carter administration’s approach to Nicaragua. Before the overthrow of Somoza, the Carter administration limited their influence in Nicaragua because they felt there was no immediate threat from communism. The US feared that an active role in Nicaragua, without an established threat from Cuba or the Soviet Union, could jeopardise congressional support for other foreign policy goals deemed more important. The Carter administration, as a result, pursued a policy of non-intervention towards the Central American country. After the fall of Somoza, and the establishment of a new government with a left wing element represented by the Sandinistas, the Carter administration emphasised non-intervention in a military sense, but actively engaged with the new Nicaraguan leadership to contain the potential communist influence that could spread across Central America in the wake of the Nicaraguan revolution.

Literatur verstehen und inszenieren: Foreign language literature through drama, a research project

Based on the experience that today's students find it more difficult than students of previous decades to relate to literature and appreciate its high cultural value, this paper argues that too little is known about the actual teaching and learning processes which take place in literature courses and that, in order to ensure the survival of literary studies in German curricula, future research needs to elucidate for students, the wider public and, most importantly, educational policy makers, why the study of literature should continue to have an important place in modern language curricula. Contending that students' willingness to engage with literature will, in the future, depend to a great extent on the use of imaginative methodology on the part of the teacher, we give a detailed account of an action research project carried out at University College Cork from October to December 2002 which set out to explore the potential of a drama in education approach to the teaching and learning of foreign language literature. We give concrete examples of how this approach works in practice, situate our approach within the subject debate surrounding Drama and the Language Arts and evaluate in detail the learning processes which are typical of performance-based literature learning. Based on converging evidence from different data sources and overall very positive feedback from students, we conclude by recommending that modern language departments introduce courses which offer a hands-on experience of literature that is different from that encountered in lectures and teacher-directed seminars.

Monstrative acts and becoming-monster: on identity, bodies, and the feminine other

Using two examples of literary monsters, the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf, this thesis demonstrates the bearing fictional identities have on “real” bodies, through an examination of two further literary texts, David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly (1986) and J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999). Western definitions of Being have historically divided body and mind, favouring the mind as formative of subjective experience and denigrating the body as secondary and impure. This thesis demonstrates that this mind/body binary is symptomatic of the masculine ontological imperative to disown the body and its effects on Being, simultaneously ridding itself of the feminine it believes is its irrational opposite. Using recent feminist reviews of the canon, which emphasise the body’s importance to ontology and demonstrate the conceptual association between the feminine and the corporeal, this thesis links performative identity practices to theories of monstrosity, explaining how fictional qualities adhere to monstrous bodies by proposing a new theoretical category, the “monstrative.” The monstrative is a performative force that makes the Other into a living sign of Otherness; however, unlike earlier theories of Othering, the monstrative accounts for the Other’s being other to herself. This thesis also attempts to read the misrepresented body of the Other as a possible site for more empowered identity performances, where the monstrous “I” is interpreted as a potentially positive model for identity practice, through the conceptualisation of identity as a process of Becoming rather than Being. The transferal from a noun to a verb not only emphasises the performativity of identity, but also suggests fluidity and multiplicity in identity practice, which always already indicates a monstrosity at work. Thus, while monstrative acts constitute bodies as monstrous, Becoming-monster is an empathetic response to the Other’s monstrosity.

Ford, Carter and Cambodia: US foreign policy and the Khmer Rouge

This thesis is an investigation into the US response to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1974 and 1981. It argues that the US experience in the Vietnam War acted as a causal factor in the formulation of its Cambodian policy during the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. From taking power in April 1975 to their removal by the Vietnamese in January 1979, the Khmer Rouge initiated a revolution unrivalled in the 20th Century for its brutality and for the total eradication of modern society. This thesis demonstrates that the Ford administration viewed Cambodia only as it pertained to their strategy in Vietnam and, following US disengagement from Indochina all but ignored the atrocities occurring there as they instead pursued informal relations with the Khmer Rouge as a means of punishing the Vietnamese. The Carter administration formulated a foreign policy based on human rights yet failed to adequately address the genocide that occurred in Cambodia due to its temporal and regional proximity to Vietnam. Instead, this collective reluctance to reengage with the region and the resulting anti-Vietnamese attitude reinforced Brzezinski’s broader global strategy that allied the US with China in support of an independent Cambodia to further isolate Hanoi. Thus this thesis argues that the distorting impact of the Vietnam War, as well as global Cold War calculations, undermined any appreciation of the Cambodian conflict and caused both administrations to pursue policies in Cambodia that ultimately supported the Khmer Rouge regime. This project incorporates declassified material from the Ford and Carter Presidential Libraries, supplemented by the material from the National Archives and Library of Congress, and relevant newspapers and periodicals. It demonstrates that the limitations placed upon US foreign policy by their experience in the Vietnam War may be used to reveal unexplored elements in US-Cambodian relations.