Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 1914–1918 conflict and their socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.
The First World War ravaged the male body on an unprecedented scale, yet fostered moments of physical intimacy and tenderness among the soldiers in the trenches. Touch, the most elusive and private of the senses, became central to war experience. War writing is haunted by experiences of physical contact: from the muddy realities of the front to the emotional intensity of trench life, to the traumatic obsession with the wounded body in nurses' memoirs. Through extensive archival and historical research, analysing previously unknown letters and diaries alongside literary writings by figures such as Owen and Brittain, Santanu Das recovers the sensuous world of the First World War trenches and hospitals. This original and evocative study alters our understanding of the period as well as of the body at war, and illuminates the perilous intimacy between sense experience, emotion and language as we try to make meaning in times of crisis.
Reservoirs of men -- Race and the deployment of troupes indigènes -- Hierarchies of rank, hierarchies of race -- Race and language in the army -- Religion and the "problem" of Islam in the French army -- Race, sex, and imperial anxieties -- Between subjects and citizens.
Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I explores the narrative traces, subaltern faces, and commemorative spaces of shell shock in wartime and postwar novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ford Madox Ford, Mary A. Ward, George Washington Lee, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Christopher Isherwood. This book argues that World War I novels serve as an untapped source of information about shell shock, and renews our present understanding of the condition by exploring the nexus of shell shock and practices of commemoration. Shell shock novelists testify to the tenaciousness and complexity of the disorder, write survivors into visibility, and articulate the immediacy of wounds that remain to be seen. This book helps readers understand more fully the extent to which shell shock continues to shape and trouble modern memories of the First World War.
Winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Prize “The best large-scale synthesis in any language of what we currently know and understand about this multidimensional, cataclysmic conflict.” —Richard J. Evans, Times Literary Supplement In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s leading historian of the period offers a dramatic account of its origins, course, and consequences. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy. He captures the slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was more than a military conflict and he also gives us the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women around the world as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora’s Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. “[An] epic and magnificent work—unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read...It is the most formidable attempt to make the war to end all wars comprehensible as a whole.” —Simon Heffer, The Spectator “[A] great book on the Great War...Leonhard succeeds in being comprehensive without falling prey to the temptation of being encyclopedic. He writes fluently and judiciously.” —Adam Tooze, Die Zeit “Extremely readable, lucidly structured, focused, and dynamic...Leonhard’s analysis is enlivened by a sharp eye for concrete situations and an ear for the voices that best convey the meaning of change for the people and societies undergoing it.” —Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers
Few concepts evoke the twentieth century’s record of war, genocide, repression, and extremism more powerfully than the idea of totalitarianism. Today, studies of the subject are usually confined to discussions of Europe’s collapse in World War II or to comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In Race and the Totalitarian Century, Vaughn Rasberry parts ways with both proponents and detractors of these normative conceptions in order to tell the strikingly different story of how black American writers manipulated the geopolitical rhetoric of their time. During World War II and the Cold War, the United States government conscripted African Americans into the fight against Nazism and Stalinism. An array of black writers, however, deflected the appeals of liberalism and its antitotalitarian propaganda in the service of decolonization. Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, John A. Williams, and others remained skeptical that totalitarian servitude and democratic liberty stood in stark opposition. Their skepticism allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the United States as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence. Bringing a new interpretation to events such as the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, Rasberry’s bird’s-eye view of black culture and politics offers an alternative history of the totalitarian century.
Focusing on Ireland's literary and artistic response to World War I, this book explores works from a range of perspectives that intervened in Irish political and cultural discourse. Works such as Patrick MacGill's novel The Amateur Army (1915), John Lavery's Daylight Raid from my Studio (1917) and Margaret Barrington's My Cousin Justin (1939) show how the war was fully examined by Irish authors--but was disregarded with the beginning of World War II. Diverse voices challenged prevailing notions of Irish national identity, from the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of Tom Kettle to the working-class internationalism of Patrick MacGill to Pamela Hinkson's cynicism about imperial patriarchy.
This volume gathers an international cast of scholars to examine the unprecedented range of colonial encounters during the First World War. More than four million men of color, and an even greater number of white Europeans and Americans, crisscrossed the globe. Others, in occupied areas, behind the warzone or in neutral countries, were nonetheless swept into the maelstrom. From local encounters in New Zealand, Britain and East Africa to army camps and hospitals in France and Mesopotamia, from cafes and clubs in Salonika and London, to anticolonial networks in Germany, the USA and the Dutch East Indies, this volume examines the actions and experiences of a varied company of soldiers, medics, writers, photographers, and revolutionaries to reconceptualize this conflict as a turning point in the history of global encounters. How did people interact across uneven intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, religion and language? How did encounters – direct and mediated, forced and unforced – shape issues from cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial networks, civil rights movements and visions of a post-war future? The twelve chapters delve into spaces and processes of encounter to explore how the conjoined realities of war, race and empire were experienced, recorded and instrumentalized.