Afterword: reconstructing the field of US First World War studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article begins by identifying the significance of the idea of reconstruction to US political and cultural discourse in 1919, across a range of registers. These included Black civic leaders and authors’ call for a reconstruction of US race relations, and also the reconstruction plans launched by the government to rehabilitate wounded US veterans into the postwar workplace. I suggest a parallel between these reconstructive energies and the way the entire field of US First World War studies has been reconstructed in recent years, capped by the surge in scholarly activity occasioned by the war’s centennial. The article offers a brief survey of some of the most prominent features of that activity in literary and cultural studies, including the decentring of literature as the undisputed centre of the cultural record of the war, the recovery of war texts by nurses and African American authors, and a revisiting of how the literature of modernism engaged the conflict. The piece then turns to how memorial is a particularly significant aesthetic and social form for us to consider the legacy of the First World War in America after the centennial, an issue inseparable from the new National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. I argue that the memorial is inclusive in ways that reflect the highly current (and charged) debate about the place of war memorials in broader US society, but is also deliberately noncommittal about the place of the First World War in the narrative of national history. The continued lack of popular consensus around the meaning of the war for the US that this decision signifies, I conclude, places the scholars involved in the recent re-evaluation of the conflict as particularly central to framing understandings of the war for a new generation.