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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
An army, Lewis Mumford once observed, "is a body of pure
consumers"-and it is logistics that feeds this body's insatiable
appetite for men and materiel. Successful logistics-the
transportation of supplies and combatants to battle-cannot
guarantee victory, but poor logistics portends defeat. In Feeding
Victory, Jobie Turner asks how technical innovation has affected
this connection over time and whether advances in technology, from
the railroad and the airplane to the nuclear weapon and the
computer, have altered both the critical relationship between
logistics and warfare and, ultimately, geopolitical
dynamics.Covering a span of three hundred years, Feeding Victory
focuses on five distinct periods of technological change, from the
preindustrial era to the information age. For each era Turner
presents a case study: the campaign for Lake George from 1755 to
1759, the Western Front in 1917, the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942,
the Battle of Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943, and the Battle of Khe
Sanh in 1968. In each of these cases the logistics of the
belligerents were at their limit because of geography or the vast
material needs of war. With such limits, the case studies both give
a clear accounting of the logistics of the period, particularly
with respect to the mode of transportation-whether air, land, or
sea-and reveal the inflection points between success and failure.
What are the continuities between eras, Turner asks, and what can
these campaigns tell us about the relationship of technology to
logistics and logistics to geopolitics? In doing so, Turner
discovers just how critical the biological needs of the soldiers on
the battlefield prove to be; in fact, they overwhelm firepower in
their importance, even in the modern era. His work shows how
logistics aptly represents technological shifts from the
enlightenment to the dawn of the twentyfirst century and how, in
our time, ideas have come to trump the material forces of war.
In Reencounters,Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live
with and remember an ongoing war when its
manifestations-hypervisible and deeply sensed-become everyday
formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond
notions of inherited trauma and post memory, Baik offers the
concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War's illegible
entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic
memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and
video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies
scholars. Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged
into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees
are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed "returnees,"
and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are
recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that
as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold
War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember
otherwise the continuing war. Ultimately, Reencounters wrestles
with questions of the nature of war, racial and sexual violence,
and neoliberal surveillance in the twenty-first century.
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