Contenu du sommaire : Séquelles de guerres.

As a part of its cultural reorganization of Japan, the American occupation paid much attention to the film industry, due to its influence on the minds of the masses. This action was focused on three main directions : a punitive phase accompanied by stern censorship, designed to eradicate all trace of militaristic propaganda ; a positive phase, highlighted by the granting of freedom of expression ; and finally an « educational phase », whose aim was to advertise the new democratic order to the Japanese public. The conclusion of this study, a preliminary research on some aspects of my doctoral thesis, is an attempt to determine to what extent one can speak of « cultural imperialism » in relation to American intervention in the cultural life of a defeated enemy.

In 1933, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) designed a monument to Benjamin Franklin. Unbuilt for years, the project at first reached only the model stage ; however this homage came to fruition in Philadelphia in 1984 as Bolt of Lightning... Memorial to Ben Franklin. The temporal distance between conception and completion forces a new look at the work stripped of its roots.

The wartime experience of Japanese American has now become pivotal in the Nikkei search to recover a lost past and reshape a new cultural identity. Through a collective celebration — the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar in Southern California — Nikkei memory reveals itself polymorphic and contradictory as official, non-official, private and public memories finally overlap. The symbolic significance of the site chosen for this commemorative ceremony, with its two distinct monuments highlights the way the « reinvention of tradition » may help ciment the reunification of a community.

In view of the de jure or de facto abolition of the death penalty throughout the Western developed world and the general evolution, the United States, where criminals are still put to death, seems to be an anomaly. After reviewing the general situation, this essay tries to find the reasons for the maintenance of such a practice and presents a few scenarios of social change toward its abolition.

Because unconscious desire presides over the production of human discourse, literature, as parole, can be said to bear the traces of its production. History, however, cannot be excluded from the various determinations at work in the production of writing. I wish to show how it constitutes one of the architects of the text, the other being the individual artist who, because of the specific nature of his or her unconscious desire, happened to be the adequate mouth-piece of the socio-historical forces at work at the time of the writing. Whether we consider the structure (repetition of a cataclysm) or the details of the writing, The Grapes of Wrath can be analyzed as a worried interrogation about events to come in Europe in 1937-1938.