Introduction: Interdisciplinary war and culture studies in action

Abstract

This is the first Varia issue of Volume 6, and a first glance at the titles suggests that it contains an apparently eclectic series of five articles. Looked at more closely, however, it becomes clear that this issue provides an excellent example of the Journal of War and Culture Studies’ (JWACS) commitment to fostering interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches, and to building a multidisciplinary community of scholars to consider diverse relationships between war and culture. This engagement with a range of disciplines is manifested not least in the academic, and indeed practitioner, backgrounds of the contributors to this issue. This issue also exemplifies the broad geographical scope now offered by the JWACS as the articles take their examples and objects of study from several very different European countries and cultures, North America, and Australia. Sara McDowell’s discipline is Human Geography, and her interest in the geography of conflict and in territoriality leads necessarily to a concern with memory and memorialization. In her article, ‘Time elapsed: untangling commemorative temporalities after conflict and tragedy’, she demonstrates how power and politics ultimately determine when the past is officially remembered, using examples of diverse forms of conflict and trauma from Britain, Ireland, Spain, the former Yugoslavia, the United States and Canada. The time that elapses between a conflict or traumatic event and its memorialization can vary significantly, due, as she shows here, to a range of collective social, economic, and political circumstances, but due also to individual needs and motivations. Philippa Lyon brings a literary and cultural analysis perspective to ‘Continuities and Disjunctions: investigating British poetry anthologies of the Second World War’. The poetry of this period has undergone a re-appraisal by anthologists and literary critics, and is now asserting its own significance with regard to the First World War poetry which has so dominated in British culture and in perceptions of the war experience, previously pushing the poetry of the later war to a marginal position. Her approach here is to investigate the value of a set of poetry anthologies published, it is important to note, during the war itself. She engages with this body of anthologies through four taxonomical categories which function as an interpretive journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 6 No. 3, August, 2013, 183–184