Decolonizing Flanders fields: Flemish Great War commemoration and the agency of literature

This article analyzes the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War in Flanders to show how the Flemish case complicates customary accounts of the relation between human rights, the duty to remember, and World War. While customary accounts see the commemoration’s focus on victims, on minor perspectives, and on the futility of war as an extension of Holocaust memory, the article shows how in the Flemish context, the Great War functions as a “screen memory” for politically divisive memories of the Second World War, of colonialism, and of labor migration. The article analyses the contribution of Flemish literature, and especially the novel Tell Someone by Rachida Lamrabet, to the commemoration of the centenary to argue that literature is a viable tool for making visible Flanders’ “colonial aphasia,” even if the power of literature to effect mnemonic change is compromised precisely by this colonial aphasia.

For King and Country

This is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis.

Keeping the Memories of the Malvinas/Falklands War Alive: Exploring Memorial Sites in the UK, Argentina and the Falkland Islands

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.

Heroes for More Than One Day: Commemorating War

The commemoration of war is almost as old as war itself – and as war has changed so too has its commemoration. This article explores some of the changes, from the emergence of vernacular forms of memorialization to the process by which objects or practices take on commemorative meaning or, alternately, lose that commemorative meaning. Commercialization has had a significant impact on memorialization and so too has the advent of virtual commemoration, especially through social media. It concludes by surveying some of the challenges that historians of war commemoration may face in the Internet age, even in the face of some striking similarities in the nature of war memorialization.

Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China

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.