Gry cyfrowe wkraczają do kanonu lektur szkolnych (Recenzja: „This War of Mine”, prod. 11 bit studios, 2014)

This War of Mine, a critically acclaimed game by 11 bit studios, is the first game to be on the list of supplementary school readings in Poland. The game released in 2014 is an anti-war narrative built around the story of a group of civilians trying to survive the war in Pogoren, city based on wartorn Sarajevo. The game is unique in its mechanics as well as in its serious treatment of death and suffering, but can also be played for pleasure and in that matter is not moralistic, but entertaining. It is an ideal game to offer young people, both as a means of developing their sensitivity and as an encouragement to seek pleasure in experiencing narratives. However, it also fits with other school readings on the cruelty of war, and thus there is a risk it will be used as other texts have been — as a story to make teenagers think about war as a formative experience which makes one a true Pole.

Normalising Nuclear War: Narrative Scenarios, Imaginative Geographies and Sites of Leisure in 1950s Britain

This chapter offers an interpretation of British regional civil defence activities in the 1950s. I argue that the persistent social impact of nationwide sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear weapons cannot be fully understood without considering the localised social, geographical and discursive contexts in which civil defence was located and enacted. This chapter traces the ways in which a wider (officially maintained) sociotechnical imaginary appears to have been embedded in and intertwined with these localised contexts. After discussing the bespoke narrative scenarios created to frame civil defence exercises and offering analysis of their public representation, I focus on sites of leisure and forms of civic engagement linked to civil defence activity. Lastly, I turn to imaginative geographies to explore how sociotechnical imaginaries became localised in this era.

War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill an existing gulf in the Nigerian Civil War narrative and create an alternative discourse against the largely upper class, male-centered voices that have hitherto characterized civil war novels.

The Almohads and the “Qur’anization” of War Narrative and Ritual

The Almohad movement (12th–13th centuries, Islamic West) had in the return to the direct study of the primary sources of Islam—the Qur’an and the Sunna—and in jihād, two of its most important pillars of legitimation and action. In this sense, it is an ideal period to study how both realities—Qur’an and jihād—were linked in a given historical context. During the Almohad period, the use of Qur’anic verses in accounts related to war episodes became widespread. We thus witness a “Qur’anization” of the war narrative, a resource adding greater religiosity and spirituality to the context of jihād, to its elaboration and discursive representation, and to its memory and remembrance through written testimonies. In this paper I study, through the main narrative and documentary sources of the period, how the Qur’an was inserted into and adapted to the Almohad war discourse. Likewise, this approach allows me to explore how the Qur’an came to life within the framework of the Almohad jihād, how it served for its justification and legitimation, and how it formed part of the ceremony and the war protocol of the Maghrebi caliphate, thus linking itself with other discursive and propaganda mechanisms such as architecture or military parades.

Cycles of Quotidien Pandemic Instances

By silencing the knowledge of our past, it will not disappear; it transforms into a hum. The hum, as a fluid object of silence can be mournful, can represent absence. The hum that we are neglecting connects with our feelings, registering as cyclic vibrations in contact with parts of the body. The vibrato of the hum speaks of unspoken relations that, according to Tina Campt, unifies quietness with sound, surrounded by affect within a register of meaningfulness. If we don’t dare to remember, some images will enunciate—and speak to—the affective register. With the sonic integration of Radio Influenza, artist Jordan Baseman’s computerized voices narrate stories from 1918 through newspaper fragments. The audible tracks add another register to the vibrations, complicating Paul Gilroy’s “politics of transfiguration,” where the “lower frequency” is purposefully over(p)layed mainly with a different set of forgotten histories suppressed from the war narrative. Hence, the sound is felt from an audible and visual register, enacted at the level of the quotidian narratives of twentieth-century photographs and newspaper stories. If we listen to these quiet photos, to these muffled stories, can we acknowledge that just as sonic vibrations, pandemics tend to come in waves as well? In the end, the 1918 spring influenza outbreak was followed by three waves: the fall of 1918, spring of 1919, and winter of 1919. These waves of history, sound, and pandemics, can push us to resist the neglectfulness and acknowledge what we have unlearned from the cycles of quotidian instances, time and time again.

Memory Makers of the Great Patriotic War

In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet museum curators began to establish a museal depiction of the war. This article analyzes these early beginnings of Soviet war commemoration and the curtailing of its surprising heterogeneity in late Stalinism. Historical research has largely ignored the impact of Soviet museum workers (muzeishchiki) on the evolution of Russian war memory. Archival material from the Red Army Museum, now renamed the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, in Moscow and the Belarus Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk documents the unfolding of locally specific war exhibitions which stand in stark contrast to the later homogenized official Soviet war narrative. Yet war memory was not created unilaterally by the curators. Visitors also participated in its making, as the museum guestbooks demonstrate. As “sites of commemoration and learning,” early Soviet war exhibitions reveal the agency of the muzeishchiki and the involvement of the visitors in the “small events” of memory creation.

Different mechanisms, same result: Remembering the liberation war in Mozambique

Even though scholars have made substantial contributions in connecting the fields of transitional justice and memory studies, important questions remain unanswered. The question of sequencing is one of them. How does a certain TJ mechanism condition the implementation of subsequent mechanisms and how together they shape memory narratives in a given society? This article builds on the case of Mozambique. Soon after the signing of the General Peace Agreement in 1992, the Frelimo-led government approved Amnesty Law 15/92 and with it, the past was to be left in the past. Such a choice was different from the one taken by Samora Machel—Mozambique’s first president—between 1975 and 1982. By promoting a quasi-truth commission, Machel revisited Mozambique’s colonial past and brought comprometidos’ actions into the open. This article finds that whether the government opened up about the past or sought to leave it behind, the result has been the same: the celebratory reproduction of the liberation war narrative. Resorting to path dependence and critical junctures, this study explains the ways in which such a narrative has become hegemonic throughout the last four decades.