Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary: Making Melancholia

In November 2016, at the halfway point of the First World War Centenary, a modest exhibition based on volunteer research and supported by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund opened in the London suburb of Wood Green. Far from the Western Front presented accounts of South Asian servicemen who served across the many theatres of war. It was only mounted for a few days, but it sought to complicate both the dominant British narrative of the First World War as trench warfare in France and Belgium, and common depiction of the British forces as white. By focusing on the ‘untold stories of South Asians whose crucial contribution shaped the First World War’ the exhibit sought to remind (or inform) visitors that ‘there was more to the First World War than the mud and trenches of Europe’. The exhibit rediscovered stories that sought to shift common perceptions of the Great War in London and introduce alternative threats and hardships into the collective memory of the War: ‘the threat of lions on patrol in East Africa, thirst in the 50 degree heat of the Sinai desert, and starvation at the Siege of Kut’....

The recent ‘recovery’ of First World War memory in Ireland has been much discussed and widely celebrated. What has been represented as Ireland’s centennial reacquaintance with its Great War heritage has been framed by a wider ‘Decade of Centenaries’: a policy construct through which a more reconciliatory approach to commemorating the violent events which gave birth to the two states on the island of Ireland has been promoted. The Decade has seen the ascendance of joint British–Irish First World War commemorations, and attempts have been made to use commemoration to bridge the ‘communal’ divide between unionism and nationalism. In this article, I interrogate this new commemorative dispensation and the assumptions that underwrite it. I argue that the reconciliatory reorientation of commemoration in Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries is based on an ethically contradictory and militaristic reframing of the First World War as ‘a war that stopped a war’. Eliding the ways in which the War has actually long been remembered in nationalist Ireland, this reframing is representative of and acts to reinforce the wider anti-political project in which the British and Irish states have been jointly involved since the advent of the peace process. Arguing that the (necro)politics of Ireland’s First World War centenary have represented the slaughter of Irishmen on Flanders’ fields as a symbolic sacrifice for a particular, neoliberal ‘peace’ in (Northern) Ireland, I will conclude that the limits of this project have been radically revealed by recent political events which have called its future hegemony into doubt.

First World War commemoration in Europe has been framed as a moment of national trial and as a collective European tragedy. But the ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was more than just a European conflict. It was a global clash of empires that began a process of agitation against imperialism in Asia, Africa and beyond. Despite the global context of the Centenary, commemorative events remain framed by national and state imaginaries in which ideas about race and imperialism that animated and dominated men and women during the Great War sit uncomfortably with today’s official sensibilities. By employing multidisciplinary frames of analysis, including new Belgian and Mandarin sources translated into English, this exciting and innovative volume explores how memory of race and empire were commemorated and obscured during the First World War Centenary.

The centenary commemoration of the First World War in 2014-2018 will generate an overwhelming interest, not only on the part of audiences but also of governments. In light of the ‘memory boom’ and the growing popularity of heritage in the last decades this should come as no surprise. At the same time, we can expect that the centenary will raise a number of criticisms and critical discussions not only about the politics of memory, but also about remembrance tourism, the commercial aspects of memory and heritage, and the relations of commemoration with historiography. Starting from the case of Flanders in Belgium, where the regional government has set up a large-scale project for the centennial, this paper takes a closer look at these discussions. Stressing the ambivalence of war commemorations, in its analysis of the centenary the paper suggests moving from a position of mere criticism which denounces certain political and commercial uses of war history to a critique of commemoration, which not only criticises practices but also recognises possibilities and merits of public commemorations of war. Keywords: War Commemoration – First World War centenary – Memory Boom ----- Bibliography: Van Alstein, Maarten: Memories of War and Peace in Flanders Fields: The Great War Centenary and the Memory Boom, ERIS, 2-2014, pp. 31-49. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v1i2.16502

1. Introduction Ashley Jackson and James E. Kitchen 2. The First World War as a global war Hew Strachan 3. Sir Charles Lucas and The Empire at War Ashley Jackson Part I: War on Imperial Frontiers 4. South Africa and World War I N.G. Garson 5. Spoils of war: Sub-imperial collaboration in South West Africa and New Guinea, 1914-20 Colin Newbury 6. 'Khaki crusaders': crusading rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916-18 James E. Kitchen 7. From defeat to victory: logistics of the campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 Kaushik Roy 8. British Understandings of the Sanussiyya Sufi Order's Jihad against Egypt, 1915-17 John Slight 9. Marching to the Beat of an Imperial Drum: Contextualising Australia's Military Effort During the First World War Rhys Crawley Part II: Home Fronts 10. Cyprus's Non-military Contribution to the Allied War Effort during World War I Antigone Heraclidou 11. African agency and cultural initiatives in the British Imperial military and labor recruitment drives in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana) during the First World War Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry 12. Norman Lindsay and the 'Asianisation' of the German Soldier in Australia during the First World War Emily Robertson 13. War opinion in South Africa, 1914 Bill Nasson 14. The War Munitions Supply Company of Western Australia and the Popular Movement to Manufacture Artillery Ammunition in the British Empire in the First World War John S. Connor 15. The expatriate firms and the Colonial economy of Nigeria in the First World War Peter J. Yearwood 16. The influence of racial attitudes on British policy towards India during the First World War Gregory Martin 17. William Morris Hughes, Empire and Nationalism: The Legacy of the First World War James Cotton Part III: Soldiers and Fighting Fronts 18. 'You will not be going to this war': the rejected volunteers of the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Nic Clarke 19. Dominion Cartoon Satire as Trench Culture Narratives: Complaints, Endurance and Stoicism Jane Chapman and Dan Ellin 20. 'Accurate to the Point of Mania': Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Making in Australia's Official Paintings of the First World War Margaret Hutchison 21. Informing the enemy: Australian prisoners and German intelligence on the Western Front, 1916-1918 Aaron Pegram 22. The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain, Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War Andrew Tait Jarboe 23. 'All in the Same Uniform'? The Participation of Black Colonial Residents in the British Armed Forces in the First World War Jacqueline Jenkinson 24. Australian and New Zealand fathers and sons during the Great War: expanding the histories of families at war Kathryn M. Hunter 25. Loss and Longing: Emotional Responses to West Indian Soldiers during the First World War Richard Smith 26. Conclusion: The First World War Centenary in the UK: 'A Truly National Commemoration'? Andrew Mycock

Surveys carried out in the UK have revealed a marked lack of awareness of the contribution of non-white, non-European soldiers during the First World War. For many, the First World War is understood as an exclusively white, European conflict that was confined to the battlefields of the Western Front. This article considers how British cultural memory of the First World War was formed over the course of the 20th century, and asks why dominant memory came to exclude the experiences of the non-white soldiers of Empire. Drawing on the scholarship of Jay Winter, this article re-considers the two major ‘memory booms’ during which popular cultural memory of the First World War developed, and argues that each of these memory-making periods was shaped by interrelated forms of exclusionary racism. In the immediate postwar period, the experience of non-white soldiers was differentially commemorated according to imperial, taxonomic racial hierarchies. In the late twentieth century, meanwhile, First World War remembrance coalesced around a fundamentally white British national memory at the expense of the non-white ‘other’. Finally, this article considers how far the recent First World War centenary may have reshaped public understanding of the conflict and integrated non-white, non-European experience into British cultural memory of the war.

The centenary of the First World War in Ireland is just one event amongst a broader series of commemorations collectively known as the decade of centenaries. This context, in itself, is unique in comparison to the other national case studies reviewed in this special edition. While the First World War centenary in Ireland is certainly no sideshow, it does have to share its place under the commemorative spotlight with other, arguably more important (at least to a large section of the population), events in Irish history. After contextualising the difficult journey the First World War has traversed in achieving recognition as part of Ireland’s national story, this article seeks to explore the way Ireland has marked the centenary of the First World War between 2014 and 2016. A range of examples led by government (whether in the Republic, Northern Ireland or the UK) and community groups (broadly defined) across the north and south of the island of Ireland will be examined in order to consider how, from a set of different perspectives, the centenary has been approached so far in Ireland. How have Irish publics been engaged with the First World War over the course of the centenary so far? What is being emphasised in these commemorative activities; what is being left out? What meaning is being drawn from the war at the centenary moment and for what present-day political purposes?

Each November, commemoration of the First World War armistice (and subsequent military events and conflicts) is almost ubiquitous in UK schools and has been given increased importance during the centenary years of the First World War. Yet as seemingly isolated occasions outside the regular curriculum, school practices of remembrance, and the understandings and perceptions surrounding them, have been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–19) investigates armistice commemoration in primary and secondary schools in three counties in southern England. This paper considers the theorisation of public commemorative rituals and relates this to teachers’ reports of school-based events. It analyses teachers’ accounts and perceptions, from survey and interview data, of the ways in which the First World War and subsequent conflicts are remembered, presented and discussed through school commemoration events. We conclude that such events mirror the ‘social technologies’ of public remembrance rituals. However, behind almost ubiquitous practices (the two-minute silence) and symbols (the poppy), these accounts reveal nuanced variations in teachers’ views of the knowledge and values children gain from armistice commemoration in schools. These variations are inflected by individual schools’ histories, community contexts, and pupil demographics, as well as teachers’ own histories, values and ideals.

This chapter examines commemoration across the Anglosphere of the centenary of the First World War, which has drawn attention to the critical ordering and articulation of shared transnational collective memories and historical narratives. Tensions between national and transnational manifestations of war commemoration reveal the legacies of the British Empire, revealing the intersections between post-imperial and post-colonial constructions of history and memory across the Anglosphere and Commonwealth. The chapter argues that although Anglospheric war commemoration is located in remembrance of past conflicts, it is intimately connected with the present and future, thus meaning its context and meaning are prone to periodic reinvention in response to contemporary geopolitical circumstances. Commemoration of the First World War across the Anglosphere highlights the layered, hybridised, porous, and contested boundaries of the so-called ‘CANZUK’ union of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the ‘core’ Anglosphere which includes the United States, a less well defined Anglosphere, and the Commonwealth. It concludes that a ‘politics of war commemoration’ both binds and divides the Anglosphere and other parts of the former British Empire, highlighting the contentious and contested nature of transnational historical narratives and memory cultures informing diverse national commemorations of the First World War centenary.

Prime Minister David Cameron has called for ‘a truly national commemoration of the First World War’. This article shows this to be problematic, politicised and contested. This is in part due to the elision of English and British histories. Scottish, Welsh and Irish responses are noted, and the role and commemorations of ‘our friends in the Commonwealth’. There are tensions around interpretations of empire and race. There has been a failure to appreciate that the debates about the legacies of the First World War are deeply entangled with those of colonialism.

Las conmemoraciones del centenario de la Primera Guerra Mundial en 2014 en Francia se han descrito por muchos comentaristas como marcadas por un nivel de consenso en contraposición al entorno político general y a los recuerdos divisivos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aún así, a pesar de los deseos comunes de honorar el poilu como un símbolo de los sacrificios de todos los soldados franceses, este artículo sostiene que la aparición del consenso enmascara tensiones más profundas entre los recuerdos de la Primera Guerra Mundial y las ideas y valores que sustentan la República Francesa. Durante la guerra y el periodo posterior, los mitos de la nación en armas sirvieron para legitimar la movilización y los inmensos sacrificios del pueblo francés. Las guerras de la Revolución Francesa establecieron la noción de la responsabilidad de los franceses en la defensa de su país, creando una conexión cercana entre el servicio militar, la ciudadanía y la membresía de la nación. Sin embargo, estas ideas se desafiaron por los recuerdos de los motines de 1917 y por los castigos impuestos a aquellos que desafiaron órdenes. Tras haber sido excluidos durante largo tiempo de las conmemoraciones oficiales, en 2014 el gobierno francés procuró rehabilitar la memoria de los soldados que fueron disparados para sentar ejemplo por cometer actos de desobediencia, espionaje y ofensas criminales. El recuerdo de aquellos soldados avivó las discrepancias sobre hasta qué punto habían consentido por voluntad propia a luchar y sacrificar sus vidas. De hecho, las reclamaciones de que los soldados habían sido «víctimas» reticentes socavaron los mitos de la «Unión Sagrada» de 1914 y los mismos cimientos de los conceptos republicanos de la nación.

Dans l’étude de la Première Guerre mondiale en France, les soldats alsaciens-lorrains tiennent une place particulière. Contrairement aux soldats des autres régions, ils ont en effet combattu en grande majorité dans le camp adverse, au sein de l’armée allemande, avant de devenir français après 1918. Un siècle plus tard, cette singularité a largement été oubliée du grand public, et fondue dans la figure nationale du poilu. Quand ce n’est pas le cas, on s’en souvient encore comme d’hommes contraints de porter l’uniforme allemand pour combattre leur patrie de cœur, la France. Or, l’historiographie récente, de même que nombre de projets menés dans le cadre du centenaire, tendent aujourd’hui à nuancer cette lecture nationale de leur expérience de guerre. On peut toutefois se demander pourquoi et comment cette image s’est fixée dans la mémoire nationale. C’est ce que nous nous proposons d’analyser dans cet article, en tentant de remonter aux origines de cette construction mémorielle et en suivant ses évolutions jusqu’à nos jours.

In April 2015 the centenary of the Armenian Genocide was commemorated. Just like the First World War centenary, this anniversary has provoked a flurry of academic and public interest in what remains a highly contested history. This article assesses the state of the current historiography on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It focuses on the possibilities for moving beyond the national narratives which continue to dominate the field, in particular through connecting the case of the Armenian Genocide to what has been termed a ‘transnational turn’ in the writing of the history of the First World War.

During the last two years we have commemorated several significant events that left a mark in Contemporary History: in 2014, the First World War Centenary; in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the End of World War II; and also the anniversary of the discovery of the Nazi Concentration Camps. The purpose of the article is to review the thought of the Popes during the years in which the World Wars took place. After reviewing different documents produced by the Popes during those years (e.g., encyclicals, statements, speeches and radiobroadcasts), it is concluded that the thought of Benedict XV, Pius XI and Pius XII was characterized by a concern for the protection of Human Rights. Such concern was not only limited to a theoretical reflection about the Rights and their grounds, but also was reflected in a fierce defense of human beings andtheir dignity, by expressing complaints about the violation of Human Rights committed by ideologies, a commitment to achieve World Peace, and by protecting those who were unfairly persecuted by political regimes. After reviewing the statement, the opinions and analysis of various philosophers of the 20th century, we can get to the conclusion that in the text remains the idea that certain rights have their support not on a rule imposed by the human being, but instead by the nature of itself. This is the reason why it is understood that we are all called to respect others rights and by which men have rights that are manifested as absolute and inviolable.

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....