Remembering the dreams, forgetting the war: commemoration and narrative in Japanese girls’ culture

Author(s):  
Ai Yamamoto ◽  
John Sonnett
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110179
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin

Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the ‘conspicuous silence’ of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalised sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-129
Author(s):  
Andrea Roxana Bellot ◽  

The remembrance of war and commemoration practices shape the collective memories of society and, as such, war has been one of the most productive topics in memory studies. Commemorating past wars is one of the ways of constructing a commonly shared memory that would enhance group cohesion and shape collective identity. This paper will provide three examples of sites of memory in reference to the Malvinas/Falklands War, one from each side of the dispute— United Kingdom, Argentina and a third example from the actual territory of the Falkland Islands to illustrate how war memorials are an expression of patriotism, built to frame the deaths in terms of a national narrative of glorious sacrifice for cause and nation. Therefore, war commemoration recalls past experiences of suffering, but at the same time, of resistance.


Author(s):  
GRAHAM OLIVER

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.


2019 ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield

In contrast to chapters 3, 4 and 5, this chapter examines the traditional anti-foreigner and particularly anti-French feeling shared by many working class people. It examines how this aided the British army in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and assesses how it contributed to the strengthening of political loyalism rather than radicalism. The account looks at examples of extraordinary rank and file unsolicited wartime bravery, and general keeness for battle which were promoted by post war commemoration and growing loyalty amongst soldiers to the martial traditions of their regiments. With rank and file support for regiment, army and nation, and with the army’s growing imperial role after 1815, this loyalism was combined with incipient imperialism. In addition, the survival of officer paternalism, albeit patchy, contributed to rank and file loyalty, often absorbing the anti-radicalism of the officer class. All this contributed to soldiers almost universally ‘doing their duty’ and explains why radical subversion was unsuccessful and why regiments could be safely used by the Victorian authorities against Chartists and strikers.


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown

This chapter examines the influence of Civil War commemoration on World War I commemoration and the impact of World War I on Civil War commemoration. The war limited recognition that the Lincoln Memorial climaxed development of the National Mall with less militarism than recent Lincoln statues suggested. Some sponsors of World War I monuments rejected Civil War precedents, such as those who projected useful memorials, but an army of doughboy statues built on Civil War precedents. The proliferation of male nudes was one example. The crisis of World War I caused some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a foreshadowing and some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a refuge from modernity. The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain illustrated both tendencies and the displacement of public monuments by cinema in the 1930s.


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