1st Edition
Experiencing 11 November 2018 Commemoration and the First World War Centenary
In a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary research, this book focuses on commemorative events around the world on the same day: 11 November 2018, the centenary of Armistice Day, the end of the First World War.
It argues that we need to move beyond discourse, narrative and how historical events are represented to fully understand what commemoration does, socially, politically and culturally. Adopting an experiential reframing treats sensory, affective and emotional feelings as fundamental to how we collectively understand shared histories, and through them, shared identities. The volume features 15 case studies from ten countries, covering a variety of settings and national contexts specific to the First World War.
Together the chapters demonstrate that a new conceptualisation of commemoration is needed: one that attends to how it feels.
- Reframing commemoration at the end of the First World War centenary: new approaches and case studies
- 11 November 2018: Liège, Mons and Brussels commemorate the Great War
- 2018 Armistice Day in Flanders Fields: how complex is commemoration at the end of an era?
- Vienna, November 7-10, 2018: A four-day journey into public commemorations of November 1918 in the Austrian republic
- The role of a politics of memory and the digital, in reframing the commemoration of Polish Independence
- Remembrance, participation, (re)emergence: Washington’s National Cathedral, 11 November 2018
- Pozières: The never-ending war on the Somme
- The sound of the cow: observing Remembrance Day in New Delhi
Shanti Sumartojo
PART I: Cities
Chantal Kesteloot and Laurence van Ypersele
Dominique Vanneste and Gregory Ramshaw
Olivier Luminet
Danielle Drozdzewski
PART II: Sites
Jeremy Foster
Caroline Winter
Peter Stanley
9.Observing Silence: Experiential Reflections on the 11 November 2018 Armistice Day Commemorations in London
James Wallis
Part III: Art
- Pages of the Sea: A UK Case Study
- Memorial Chairs and Transitory Fictive Kinship in the Centenary Commemoration of the End of the First World War
Emma Hanna
Kingsley Baird
12 Flowers of War: 11 November 2018 at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance
Shanti Sumartojo
- Just like being there: technologies of reconstructed experience and First World War commemoration
- To be or not to be Danish? Commemorating the First World War in Denmark on 11 November 2018
- The 10 November 2018 Indian commemoration in Villers-Guislains in the north of France: Atmosphere and the experience of alterity
- What is still known about 11 November 1918 by German-speaking Belgians?
Katherine Smits
Part IV: Multiplicities
David C. Harvey
Anne Hertzog and Rafiq Pirzada
Christin Camia, Clara Falys, Jelena Scheider and Olivier Luminet
Biography
Shanti Sumartojo is Associate Professor of Design Research and a member of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
"The proposed collection offers an impressive comparative approach to the study of war commemoration... I would recommend this to anyone doing research on war memory, and commemorative activities in particular."- Geoffrey White, University of Hawai‘i, USA
"A refreshing anthropology of a moment of commemoration... it should reach across several disciplinary areas." - Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow, UK
"Sumartojo’s international essay collection on the tangible and intangible legacies of the First World War raises timely questions of affects and politics through suggestive evocations of atmospheres attuned to discourses and feelings."
Marlene Briggs, Journal of British Studies