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This chapter celebrates public occasions and measures in recent years where the American government and citizens’ groups acknowledged national “misdeeds” in international relations, especially in its wars. The chapter begins with the 1998 Pentagon award of three soldiers’ medals to the helicopter crewmen who sought to call the My Lai massacre to a halt. It then describes recent presidential apologies for American failures to curb massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda. The author then nominates some still-to-be-acknowledged occasions for repentance in this country’s recent international affairs: the civilian-bombings of World War II, failures of public leaders to mourn — or even to count — the deaths of enemies in war, and the arrogance of American claims to global “full spectrum dominance”. The chapter concludes with pleas that America listen more carefully to its friendly critics in other countries, especially the two countries with which the book began: Germany and South Africa.

This chapter argues that we can use “virtue” as what Aaron Stalnaker has called a “bridge concept” to facilitate comparative dialogue between Neo-Confucian discussions centered around “de” and current work in virtue ethics. The chapter traces early uses and theories concerning de, drawing on the work of Chinese scholars like Chen Lai and others. It then turns to a detailed look at uses of de in Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, and explicates the relation between de—which functions very much like “virtue” functions in Western philosophies—and other key ideas like coherence (li), heart-mind (xin), and humaneness (ren). The chapter also looks at the role of rules in a virtue-based ethics. On the basis of this analysis, the chapter concludes that Neo-Confucianism is a virtue ethics.

This chapter analyzes the historical aspects of the death notices for Hugh Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who put a stop to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. It suggests that while the obituarists attempted to recover some sense of humanity in Thompson's life, their flat accounts did little to illuminate the source of his courageous resistance or explain the brutalities perpetrated by the men in Charlie Company at the My Lai Massacre. This chapter also suggests that histories of whatever genre can never escape the limitations of representation to become history as such.

The Fables of Marie de France, the oldest fable collection in the vernacular, elevate the fable from its traditional role as a school‐room text to a work of courtly entertainment. Engaging with Hans Robert Jauss's claim that Marie's fables are infused with feudal values, this chapter discusses loyalty, treachery, honour, shame, lordship, and vileinie as naturally embedded features of Marie's fable world, and the degree to which it is committed to notions of social hierarchy and the status quo. However, it goes on to show that the fables also endorse self‐reliance, cunning, and mistrust of others, and so remain true to the traditional experiential, non‐systematic, wisdom of fable. The function of animals in Marie's Lais is contrasted with their role in the Fables, with especial reference to the contrasting notions of counsel (‘cunseil’) in each. The final section considers the ironic relation between the female author and the female deities who govern the animal world in the Fables.

This chapter focuses on two productions of Antigone in Manipur, a police state in North-East India: a 1995 production directed by Nongthombam Premchand, and a 2004 production directed by Kshetrimayum Jugindro Singh. In these productions Antigone is about the conflict between regional autonomy and national stability. These productions have been used to articulate, celebrate, and perform ‘Manipuri’ culture, and to establish a regional identity that is distinct from, if not in opposition to, the national identity and culture imposed on Manipur's citizens by the Indian government. As such, they mount both a cultural and political resistance to the national government. In Manipur, the act of staging Antigone is itself an Antigone-like act of defiance against the state, thus a production of Antigone in Manipur is not simply a story about a political act; it is itself a political act.

This chapter provides an account of the gigantic human catastrophe that devastated Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s, due to the Ha My and My Lai massacres. The connectedness of these incidents was not limited to the dynamic theater of a territorial war but also had a global dimension. The crimes were inseparable from the bipolar geopolitical structure and the interstate network dominant at the time of the Cold War. The postwar state hierarchy of Vietnam promoted the worship of the heroic war dead to a civic religion and, in doing so, demoted the traditional culture of death commemoration. A generation after the end of the war, the political economy of memory is now changing in Vietnam. The people of Ha My and My Lai are now engaged in renovating the places of the dead, as a part of “the commemorative fever.”

The Vietnamese perception of the world incorporates the awareness that the life of the dead is intertwined with that of the living, and that the Vietnamese idealize a harmonious relationship between the two forms of life. The morality of death, in modern history, cannot be considered independently from the history of mass death. In Ha My and My Lai, mass death was a central episode in family and village history. The war in Vietnam resulted in high numbers of displaced, troubled, and ritually “uncontrolled deaths.” This chapter examines the implications of the conceptual polarity for the memory of mass death. To illustrate this, it discusses relevant sociological theories about death symbolism. Furthermore, it highlights the two-sided commemorative ritual practice, and relates it to the idea of “symbolic ambidexterity” proposed by Robert Hertz. Finally, it considers its practical implications and theoretical significance against the background of the moral symbolic hierarchy of death.

This chapter introduces a brief history of Ha My and My Lai with a focus on the historical situation of the village being turned inside out by the violent forces of the Cold War. The abstraction of total war had to be weighed against concrete needs for survival, and this painful negotiation was a genuine people's struggle in the streets during the violent Cold War. This paradigm of the people's war also became a reality, with tragic consequences, to some of those who fought against the paradigm. Following this, the chapter discusses the history of the village's ancestral temples and their fluctuation between being positive and negative moral symbols as a way of situating the political history within the spectrum of local norms. Even post Cold War, the political identity of the people could not be settled and they had to deal with the consequences of the war.

In Vietnam, household death-commemoration rites are a rich store of historical evidence. The domestic ritual calendars in places like My Lai and Ha My offer a panoramic view of the fluctuating production of violent death in past generations. People gathered after the Ha My and My Lai wars to share their sorrow and joy, a generation after the war. The end of a generation of separation involved many people and opened up a new perspective on reality. Above all, it meant the restoration of the right to approach the life-world as an encompassing reality that includes afterlife as well as life. The Ha My villagers began to improve their domestic environment, and they started by renovating the dwelling places of their dead relatives. The modernization of village life was initiated in both cosmological terrains, and the vision of a prosperous future materialized first in the place of the dead.

This chapter examines a handful of the best-documented prison revolts in French Indochina prior to 1930 to illustrate some of the reasons for the profound instability of the colonial prison system. It explains that the rebellion on Poulo Condore in 1890 shows how grievances against the legal system played a catalytic role in revolts and that the uprisings in Poulo Condore in 1918 and Lai Chau in 1927 illustrate the explosive combination of autocratic management and the rapid turnover of prison directors. It also discusses the reasons for external attacks on prisons.

Using Donna Gabaccia’s theory on the intersection between ethnic food and ethnic American identity as a point of entry, this chapter examines how Bich Minh Nguyen’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again complicate the reader’s understanding of the narrators’ bi- and multi-cultural heritage through their families’ culinary practice; how food signifies the effects of migration on the narrators’ girlhood as well as their families; how different cultural and ethnic elements, particularly exemplified by a mixed variety of food, affect the narrators’ growing up in Michigan and Alabama, respectively; and, how food relates to the narrators’ Vietnamese American identity. Writing about the eater and what they eat in their childhoods, the narrators document how alimentary racism affects their evolving eating habits and how they overcome and creolize such discourses within their bildungsromans.

Larry May’s chapter is concerned with the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello and attempts to offer a unified response to two seemingly disparate questions: When should war crimes trials be staged? Who can be held liable for violations of jus ad bellum? Schooled on the Nuremberg precedent, we tend to think of war crimes trials as post hoc phenomena, staged in the aftermath of war. But as May points out, this need not be the case; May finds a potent example in the My Lai massacre and the trial of William Calley that ensued. Despite its anomalous features, the Calley trial stands as an example of a war crimes trial staged in the midst of ongoing hostilities. As the struggle against global terror has destabilized the very distinction between conditions of war and peace we might expect to see more Calley-like trials in the future.

This chapter focuses on the atrocities committed by U.S. troops against civilians during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. More specifically, it examines the murderous misconduct by U.S. soldiers in No Gun Ri in Korea, My Lai in Vietnam, and Haditha in Iraq. It also considers how the rules of engagement affected civilian life. Finally, it assesses the attitude of the U.S. government and the American public toward such atrocities.

The Taiwanese talent when it comes to baseball succeeded at the professional level in the 1990s. This was the first time this happened since Taiwanese players joined Japan's professional leagues in the 1930s and 1940s. American major league teams were tempted by the talented players coming of age in Taiwan. The Cincinnati Reds tried for years to obtain the rights to Engjey Kao and Lai-hua Lee, known as the finest pitcher-catcher battery ever produced in Taiwan. Kao and Lee would become the first Taiwanese players in three decades to retrace the steps of several of their Jiayi elders and play professionally in Japan.

Chapter two experiences the urban terrain of Hong Kong as a kinesthetic dramatization of Hong Kong's unsteady relationship to Chineseness. Through a somatic mapping of the city the chapter examines Hong Kong's particular postcolonial predicament — its return to the mainland after 100 years of British rule — and attendant cultural identity crisis. As a place through which things and people from every direction cross and recross, Hong Kong sometimes seems like a place without any actual land, just an intricate network of transit systems in kinetic suspension. The chapter explores a dance piece called Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (1997) by City Contemporary Dance Company and a series of public protests by the spiritual group Falun Gong, both of which occurred around the time of Hong Kong's handover to China. Both choreographies reveal Hong Kongers' efforts to apprehend the city during a time of uncertainty. The chapter argues that both the dance piece and the protests served as critiques of the forces of global capitalist flow that tend to motivate the everyday choreography of the streets of Hong Kong. At the moment of the handover these two choreographies strove to make visible the bodies handed over through this transfer of sovereignty. This chapter suggests that alternate kinetic forces can work to inject blips, stutters, and stillness into a habitus otherwise dominated by free flow.

Fusing theories from performance studies and Naoki Sakai's theory of translation as social address, this chapter examines Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai's xiangsheng (crosstalk) work as it challenges the concept of "China" (the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China) as the nation-state. While Stan Lai was one of the leading participants of the modern theater renaissance in the 1980s that was influenced by both the "tradition" and "native soil" discourses in the 1970s, his plays, as this chapter argues, go beyond their nativist imaginations. This chapter examines how Lai's work points to the discontinuity in tradition and critiques the alleged sense of place in the "native soil" movement. It also analyzes how Lai's plays challenge the continuity of national history, turning it into a series of performative events in which repetitions carry the potential toproduce and proliferate difference without origin. The discontinuity of linear history and the absence of identifiable characters in Lai's experimental historiographical plays produce "China" as a fundamentally heterogeneous social space that does not cohere with any nation-state.

This chapter considers the incorporation of the courtly love ideal into the verse narratives of some Arthurian romances. It also examines the question of how widely the principles of courtly love were actually put into practice in the twelfth century. The discussions cover the source material of Arthurian romance; a reading of Chrétien's “Lancelot”; aristocratic speech in the Tristan myth; the Lais of Marie de France; more real-life romances of the late twelfth century; and courtly love conventions' satirical treatment in fabliaux.