Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary engages with the explosion of public commemorations in Britain and France in the wake of the First World War centenary, alongside the hyper-visibility of British and French Muslims in political and popular discourse. Bringing these two phenomena together, it draws on national commemorations of the First World War centenary in Britain and France, alongside eleven local field sites that foregrounded Muslims, to make sense of how national memory changes when it seeks to include a previously excluded group. Through an identification of three distinct narratives, which correspond to three ways of situating Muslims in relation to the nation—mourning, mobilisation, and melancholia—it intervenes in debates surrounding memory, nationhood, and belonging to make sense of the centenary as an extended exercise in nation-building at a moment when the borders of British and French national identity were openly, and violently, contested. With particular attention to sites of melancholia, the author shows how certain sites disrupt national memory and refrain from producing any cohesive narrative to repair that which has been fractured. An exploration of the ways in which commemoration pushes nations to grapple with their past and present, without prescribing any tidy solution, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in memory studies, nationalism and postcolonial studies.

The ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was more than a European conflict. It was a global war spanning Asia, Africa and beyond. Drawing on original archival research in several languages and employing multidisciplinary frames of analysis, this innovative volume explores how race and empire were commemorated during the First World War Centenary.

Decolonizing the Memory of the First World War contributes to the imperial turn in First World War studies. This book provides an exploration of the ways in which war memory can be appropriated, neglected and disabled, but also “unlearned” and “decolonized”. The book offers an analysis of the experience of soldiers of colour in five novels published at the centenary of the First World War by David Diop, Raphaël Confiant, Fred Khumalo, Kamila Shamsie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, examining the poetics and the politics of the conflict’s commemoration. It explores continuities between WWI and earlier and later eruptions of violence, thus highlighting the long-lasting sequels of the first global conflict in the former French, British and German empires. It thereby asks important questions about the decolonization of the memory of the First World War, its tools, critical potential and limitations. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students working in postcolonial literatures, postcolonial and decolonial studies, First World War studies, colonial history, human and political geography, as well as readers interested in cultural memory and overlapping legacies of violence.

In a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary research, this book focuses on commemorative events around the world on the same day: 11 November 2018, the centenary of Armistice Day, the end of the First World War. It argues that we need to move beyond discourse, narrative and how historical events are represented to fully understand what commemoration does, socially, politically and culturally. Adopting an experiential reframing treats sensory, affective and emotional feelings as fundamental to how we collectively understand shared histories, and through them, shared identities. The volume features 15 case studies from ten countries, covering a variety of settings and national contexts specific to the First World War. Together the chapters demonstrate that a new conceptualisation of commemoration is needed: one that attends to how it feels.

Across the twentieth century, the families of people who died in war and disaster were left to make sense of their sudden loss and navigate newfound grief. This book focuses the families of people who died in the First World War and in mining disasters in the early twentieth-century. These bereaved families were often denied access to bodies and choice over burial rights, all while dealing with the increased bureaucracy of death.Families created domestic memorials, which took on additional meaning because of this lack of memorial agency elsewhere. Although the ways that these families were bereaved each took place in different circumstances, the ways that families grieved were recognizable to one another: they drew on common memorial practices, augmented to take on special meaning after sudden death.This memorial material provided a vehicle for families to navigate their loss, but also to communicate the memory of the dead both externally, through donation to museums, and linearly, through ancestral lines. Drawing on a nuanced reading of a wide range of sources - from ephemera to administrative museum paperwork - this book explores family reactions to mass death events in early twentieth-century Britain. The result is a comparative and domestic perspective on mourning at the turn of the century that makes important contributions to the growing field of death studies, and will be of interest to those working on the First World War, interwar Britain, the history of work, the social history of the family, and the history of memorialization. 6 b&w illustrations

This is the first book to bring together an interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and global perspective on the First World War through the lens of historical and cultural geography. Reflecting the centennial interest in the conflict, the collection explores the relationships between warfare and space, and pays particular attention to how commemoration is connected to spatial elements of national identity, and processes of heritage and belonging. Venturing beyond military history and memory studies, contributors explore conceptual contributions of geography to analyse the First World War, as well as reflecting upon the imperative for an academic discussion on the War’s centenary. This book explores the War’s impact in more unexpected theatres, blurring the boundary between home and fighting fronts, investigating the experiences of the war amongst civilians and often overlooked combatants. It also critically examines the politics of hindsight in the post-war period, and offers an historical geographical account of how the First World War has been memorialised within ‘official’ spaces, in addition to those overlooked and often undervalued ‘alternative spaces’ of commemoration. This innovative and timely text will be key reading for students and scholars of the First World War, and more broadly in historical and cultural geography, social and cultural history, European history, Heritage Studies, military history and memory studies.