Around 1945

"Around 1945 examines an issue that preoccupied social and political thinkers at mid-century and that has resonance still: Who is a citizen and on what grounds is citizenship defined? The volume attempts to articulate some of the complexities that inform the relation between citizenship and human rights in light of a reconsideration of citizenship and rights that occurred in the postwar era. Literary texts and cultural events model problems of rights, such as dignity, freedom, sovereignty, and responsibility. The ssays are unified by an investigation of the human and cultural aspects of universal rights."-- "The dilemmas of citizenship were especially acute right after the Second World War. Refugees and stateless people had no human rights protections because they had no national citizenship. Countries further refined the entitlements of citizens according to perceived degrees of belonging. The term "Commonwealth citizen," for instance, was first used in the British Nationality Act 1948 to designate a person with limited number of civil rights, in contradistinction to a "British citizen," who had full civil rights and liberties. At the same time, citizenship assumed international dimensions, especially after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948, which promises world citizenship for "all members of the human family." Around 1945 traces questions of citizenship and rights through literary, photographic, and cinematic examples. Novels are a particularly fertile genre for modelling the hanging obligations of citizenship because they represent conflict and change through time; novelistic plots incarnate rights through characters and events. Many of the chapters in this volume focus on novels, although others find other generic formations more amenable to the problems of citizenship, such as the notebook, the documentary, the confession, and the melodrama. These essays trace the rippling consequences of the Second World War from 1945 through the Cold War and into the present."--