The Paradoxes of Metamorphosis

How can we make sense of the cumulative experience of role reversal during and after the Second World War? This concluding article weaves together the insights from the contributions of this special issue and identifies four overarching themes: the reshaping of power relations; the interconnectedness of experiences of foreign rule; the interrelations and blurred boundaries between occupation and imperial rule; and the multiple, protracted endings of the global Second World War. In engaging with these themes, the article reframes the mid-twentieth century as an Age of Metamorphosis, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of the transformations triggered by the Second World War and its aftermath. These upheavals exposed the fragility of social hierarchies and allowed people to imagine a different future. Yet they also coexisted with a widespread yearning for normality and a cessation of the transformations of the recent past. By conceptualizing these developments as metamorphosis, the article questions timelines that treat 1945 as a definitive endpoint. Instead, it highlights the drawn-out ‘sorties de guerre’ (‘exits from war’) as well as the hybrid legacies of the experience of mutability that characterised the long 1940s.