This volume brings together an international cast of scholars from a variety of fields to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War, and show how issues of race and empire shaped its literature and culture. The global nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus of intense enquiry. This book analyses European discourses about colonial participation and recovers the war experience of different racial, ethnic and national groups, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Maori, West Africans and Jamaicans. It also investigates testimonial and literary writings, from war diaries and nursing memoirs to Irish, New Zealand and African American literature, and analyses processes of memory and commemoration in the former colonies and dominions. Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict's reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.
• The international and multi-racial perspective of this book will appeal to readers who are increasingly uncomfortable with a Eurocentric view of the First World War • Issues such as race and wartime representation, inter-racial contact, and literary and cultural memory are analysed in an easy and accessible style • Brings together scholars from diverse fields such as history, literature, sociology, and colonial, war and gender studies
Contents
Introduction Santanu Das; Part I. Voices and Experiences: 1. 'An army of workers': Chinese indentured labour in First World War France Paul J. Bailey; 2. Sacrifices, sex, race: Vietnamese experiences in the First World War Kimloan Hill; 3. Indians at home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918: towards an intimate history Santanu Das; 4. 'We don't want to die for nothing': Askari at war in German East Africa, 1914–1918 Michelle Moyd; 5. France's legacy to Demba Mboup? A Senegalese Griot (and his descendants) remember his military service during the First World War Joe Lunn; Part II. Perceptions and Proximities: 6. Representing Otherness: African, Indian, and European soldiers' letters and memoirs Christian Koller; 7. Living apart together: Belgian civilians and non-white troops and workers in wartime Flanders Dominiek Dendooven; 8. Nursing the Other: the representation of colonial troops in French and British First World War nursing memoirs Alison S. Fell; 9. Imperial captivities: colonial prisoners of war in Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 Heather Jones; 10. Images of Te Hokowhitu A Tu in the First World War Christopher Pugsley; Part III. Nationalism, Memory and Literature: 11. 'He was black, he was a white man, and a dinkum Aussie': race and empire in revisiting the Anzac legend Peter Stanley; 12. The quiet Western Front: the First World War and New Zealand memory Jock Phillips; 13. 'Writing out of opinions': Irish experience and the theatre of the First World War Keith Jeffery; 14. 'Heaven grant you strength to fight the battle for your race': nationalism, Pan-Africanism and the First World War in Jamaican memory Richard Smith; 15. Not only war: the First World War and African American literature Mark Whalan; Afterword: death and the afterlife: Britain's colonies and dominions Michèle Barrett.
Reviews
'This new volume of essays provides a wonderfully comprehensive account of its subject. Since the various 'official', national or commissioned histories of the war have not paid attention to the experience of colonized peoples, the essays in this book draw information from a range of previously unpublished material. These extraordinary resources are shaped into new formulations by some of the most prominent scholars in their fields. The result is a stunningly fresh perspective on an event which continues to open new dimensions of understanding just as it maintains its signal importance in modern history.' Vincent Sherry, Washington University, St Louis
'Santanu Das has presented a collection of scholarly essays which powerfully re-centres the history of the Great War in its full imperial character. By doing so, he and his contributors have de-centred the story from a familiar Eurocentric one to a much more interesting and destabilizing portrait of men from all over the world who were drawn into the conflict, and who had their lives and their futures changed by it. Here is a major contribution to the cultural history of the 1914–18 war.' Jay Winter, Yale University
'Engaging voices recovered from diaries, censored letters and oral histories resurrect the soldiers and workers whose experiences provide diverse narratives of 'The old lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori'.' Times Literary Supplement
'Das's edited volume is an exemplary study of global First World War encounters.' History Workshop Journal
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