Imaginative Mislocation: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century

The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, suggests that the historical legacy of the first military use of atomic weaponry is still fiercely contested in the USA. The spat is merely the latest conflict in a long war over the significance of the bombings, which resurfaces with each new book, exhibition or programme that appears. When the ruins of the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome – formerly the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall – were nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, the United States objected on the basis of concerns over a ‘lack of historical perspective’, arguing that the ‘events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are key to understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima’. The appeal to historical facts by both US diplomats and, more recently, military veterans contrasts with the dehistoricized emphasis of other Western cultural responses to Hiroshima. But what both kinds of reception share is an occlusion of the prehistory of capitalist liberalism, colonialism and imperialism which produces Japanese modernity,a prehistory which is itself built into the Genbaku Dome’s concrete structure, and an afterlife of nuclear pacification which produces the global context of terrorism as the continuation of war by other means.

Codeswitching in Igbo-English Bilingualism

This study evaluates the Matrix Language Frame model of codeswitching with Igbo-English data and concludes that the data can indeed be considered a classic case of codeswitching, in that a Matrix Language can be clearly identified in bilingual clauses. It establishes this through both qualitative and quantitative analyses that make use of the typological contrasts between Igbo and English to uncover supportive evidence for the Matrix Language Frame model and its associated three principles: the Matrix Language Principle, the Asymmetry Principle, and the Uniform Structure Principle. The investigation goes one step further by using spectrograms and the analysis of vowel harmony between English free morphemes and Igbo bound affixes to demonstrate that two phonologies can co-exist in codeswitching and that codeswitching forms are essentially pronounced with a phonology that does not entirely resemble that of the Matrix Language variety. Furthermore, the study finds that the same language production mechanisms as detailed under the Matrix Language Frame model and its associated three principles underlie both single word and multi-word codeswitching. That is, the present study, like those before it adopting the Matrix Language framework (see Amuzu 2010: 277), underlines the importance of the assumptions underpinning the Matrix Language Principle: (1) that language production is modular; (2) that lexical structure is both complex and abstract; and (3) that languages in contact divide responsibilities in what they may contribute toward lexical structure during the production of mixed constituents. Moreover, the study finds that Igbo-English bilinguals can always sustain ready access to their mother tongue mental lexicon during online speech production and thus Igbo-English may duly be described as a ‘classic’ case of codeswitching.

Winston Churchill and the General Strike

Exploring the myths and legends which surround Churchill's role in the 1926 General Strike this places his involvement in the events of that year within the context of his views of sympathy strikes from before the Great War. The continuing importance of these views is shown to explain the marked contrasts between Churchill's approach to the General Strike in May 1926 and his efforts to find a way to resolve the coal dispute which dragged on throughout the year.