Plane Spotting, Military Portraiture, and Multiculturalism in the Imperial War Museum

Abstract

The 2008 Imperial War Museum exhibition “From War to Windrush” was intended to “commemorate the contribution of Black men and women from the Caribbean and Britain during the First and Second World Wars.” Freeing the imaginary of the Second World War from its conjunction with an exclusionary “white” British or English national identity is no small undertaking; in fact, as Paul Gilroy suggests, nostalgia for Second World War imagery often functions to obscure the memory of the colonial past. “From War to Windrush” challenged the naturalized associations between notions of “heritage,” nostalgic affect, and an exclusively “white” memory of the Second World War. It achieved this by borrowing the memorializing and nationalistic form of the military portrait, altering portraits of black servicemen and servicewomen made within other photographic genres to conform to the national dimensions of this recognizable form. Through this form, the exhibition therefore reproduced the structural tension inherent in multicultural national identity: that between the conflicting need to understand the nation, in Homi Bhabha's words, as both “the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal.”