Anzac, Race and Empire

In 2015, a new memorial was unveiled in Sydney’s Hyde Park, the formal green rectangle in the city’s centre. In a creative and vibrant city like Sydney, the launch of a new public artwork was not remarkable, but this event differed because it was a new war memorial, and even more unusually, it commemorated the military service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians. Designed by Indigenous artist Tony Albert, ...

Situating the Belgian Congo in Belgium’s First World War Centenary

As in other countries, the surge of interest in Great War commemoration in Belgium has taken many by surprise. Public engagement in 2014 was undeniable: exhibitions were visited, special newspaper editions were bought, documentaries were watched and elaborate commemorations attended. Public demand for knowledge of the First World War was driven by a desire to situate family and local history within wider themes of the War. In the course of such commemoration, Belgians rediscovered the horror of the trenches, the massacres of civilians in 1914 and the harshness of the German occupation, whilst attempting to situate their own family histories in the grand narrative of the conflict. In contrast, it is clear that the participation of the Belgian Congo in the First World War received neither official nor media attention. Only modest private initiatives saw the light of day during the Centenary. But with a significant Congolese diaspora resident in Belgium, how can we explain the ‘forgetting’ of the Belgian Congo in the Centenary commemorations? What indeed was the Belgian Congo’s actual contribution to the War? Who organised those rare initiatives of commemoration and for whose benefit? These are the questions that will frame this chapter, which examines the two major issues that pertained to the Belgian Congo in 1914-1918: the question of the colony’s neutrality and then the major military operations in central Africa. In light of this, the chapter then examines and explains the lack of commemorative activity in Belgium concerning its former colony. This chapter concludes that the regional administrative division of commemorative organisation combined with the historical conditioning of Belgian colonial memory created this absence in Belgium’s Centenary commemorations....

Aesthetic Form and Political Function

This chapter examines selected examples from collections of First World War posters from across British India and French Algeria. Current historiographies of colonial participation in the First World War provide an important cultural context for understanding why poster artists used stereotypes as a form of public mediation....

Resénégalisation and the Representation of Black African Troops during World War One

It is only very recently that recognition has been given to the massive and possibly decisive contribution made by troops from France’s Empire to its ultimate victory in both World Wars. The ‘rediscovery’ of their role afforded them belated acknowledgement in the commemorations of the centenary of World War One. The original plans for the centenary barely acknowledged the role of colonial troops, an omission challenged by Rachid Bouchareb and Pascal Blanchard who successfully proposed the addition of the commemorative project ‘Frères d’armes’. This rediscovery invites reflection on what factors may have contributed to the long neglect of their participation in combat. This chapter explores the immediate historical context of the deployment of one segment of these colonial troops during World War One: the ...

Maori and Great War Commemoration in New Zealand

When Lord Liverpool, the Governor of New Zealand announced from the steps of Parliament in Wellington on August 5, 1914 Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, there was no sign of doubt among the large crowd gathered that the former colony would enthusiastically support the campaign. Prime Minister William Massey had a few days before offered London a New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and announced to Parliament that he had ‘no fear of volunteers not being forthcoming.’...

Marigolds and Poppies

India is a nation in which paradoxically, the past is omnipresent but the age of any given structure can be annoyingly indeterminate. It is a place where the past can be both absolutely present and frustratingly remote; in which versions of the past co-exist; in which they can contend without necessary contradiction, though sometimes bringing risk of denunciation, controversy and even death. It is a culture in which layers of meaning and significance accrete around historical events – even historical events recorded in the daily newspaper. India takes its many pasts seriously – but can ignore aspects of its history in ways unthinkable in other societies. The Great War of 1914-1918 is an inescapable part of the history of Australia or New Zealand, and even in Britain remains a part of the currency of everyday speech and popular culture. In the nations of South Asia, by contrast, the Great War remains obscure and unimportant....

A Tale of Two Monuments

The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind and sand erase all trace of men on the open ranges (Albert Camus, The First Man).1 With these words, colonial Algeria’s most famous war orphan, Albert Camus, encapsulated the struggle of thousands of families across his homeland, both Europeans and indigenous Algerians, who sought to commemorate a loved one lost on the distant battlefields of Europe. For Camus, while France was the land of cypress-lined war cemeteries, his Algerian homeland was marked by memorial anarchy where memory defied official processes of regulation and the forces of nature conspired to undermine aspirations to eternal perpetuation. Behind this lyricism lies a tacit acknowledgement of the very real challenges facing those who seek to elaborate a commemorative discourse in colonial and post-colonial societies where, even more so than in metropolitan societies, rival narratives of past, present and future are constantly struggling for dominance. In this chapter, I will trace the evolution of commemorative culture in colonial and post-colonial Algeria by comparing and contrasting the case studies of the war memorials in the cities of Algiers and Oran. In ...

From ‘Coolie’ to Transnational Agent

In April 2010 China Central Television’s international English-language channel (Channel Nine) broadcast a six-episode documentary in its series ‘New Frontiers’ hosted by Ji Xiaojun on the 130,000-plus Chinese workers recruited by the French and British governments during World War One. In portentous tones Ji Xiaojun boldly announced in the first episode that the World War One Chinese workers ‘stood shoulder to shoulder’ with British and French troops to combat German military aggression, and that in the process 20,000 of them were killed. Such a valuable contribution to the Allied victory, Ji continued, was not fully acknowledged by France and Britain until fifty years after the end of the war. Overall, the programme depicted the episode as a shining example of China’s positive and beneficial interaction with the world ...

The First Circle of Memory

“‘Marsels!’ ‘We have reached Marsels!’ ‘Hip Hip Hurrah!’ The sepoys were shouting excitedly on deck. Lalu got up from where he sat watching a game of cards and went to see Marseilles”.1 The opening lines of Muluk Raj Anand’s well informed and celebrated novel ...

‘A Strange, New Race’: Eugenics and the Australian Soldier in the First World War

When Pierre Nora launched his study of the historical concept of ‘collective memory’ in France in the late 1970s, he emphasised the idea that a group’s identity constantly integrates its sense of the past. When this memory is connoted as ‘national’ what is retained as the past is influenced by shifting politics of identity....