Ross Wilson

Memory and trauma: narrating the Western Front 1914-1918

The memory of the Western Front still seems to haunt British society nearly 90 years after the Armistice. The mention of the battlefields of the Somme or Passchendaele, or references to ‘the trenches’ evokes sadness and poignancy as the Western Front represents a traumatic memory within Britain. The image of the soldiers suffering in the trenches as victims of the war appears so deeply ingrained that military historians have lamented the seemingly impossible task of revising the popular memory of the conflict. Attempts to show the tactical advances made by the army, the positive attitudes of the soldiers and the emphasis on the fact that the British Army was victorious in the war, have failed to make an impact on popular perceptions. This paper highlights that this failure stems from the narratives employed by historians of the war, which fail to accommodate or acknowledge the trauma still felt by contemporary society. By exploring alternative narrative styles this paper offers an alternative to the linear narratives, and stresses that through a non-linear narrative historians can begin to engage with the ideas which drive the popular memory. Using recent multi-disciplinary work which has drawn from archaeological and anthropological perspectives this paper describes the British soldiers on the Western Front as arriving at an understanding of a hostile war-landscape. Through an alternative narrative this paper demonstrates a way in which the conflict can be remembered and studied without being hidden within a veil of sentimentality.

Forgetting to heal : remembering the abolition act of 1807

This article investigates the cultural memory of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. It examines official government responses and considers how these were replicated in popular culture, drawing on the film Amazing Grace. The study highlights the rhetoric employed to distance the past of the transatlantic slave trade from the present, thereby contributing to a process of historical erasure rather than tackling the lingering social and political affects of a traumatic past.

Behind the scenes of the museum website

Abstract This article examines the role of online resources hosted by museums as a means to communicate, engender research and reach out to new audiences. A number of scholars have already analysed the online presence of institutions and created an innovative new field of study by critiquing and theorising the emergence of ‘digital heritage’. Building upon these developments, this article examines museum websites from a new perspective, through the markup and programme languages used to deliver the online content to the user. Drawing upon the nascent field of ‘critical code studies’, this article analyses the online exhibition ‘Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum’, to illustrate the value of this approach. This analysis highlights the manner in which the ‘virtual’ visitor experience is structured in a fashion comparable to the ‘real’ visitor experience. Using theories of ‘intertextuality’, this article examines the analogous relationship between the markup and programme languages and wider museum practice.

History, Memory and Heritage

The manner in which the various manifestations of memory and remembering constitute the myriad character of ‘heritage’ presents a complex web of associations for practitioners and academics concerned with the wider field of heritage studies. Memory studies itself appears as a diverse and seemingly ill-defined field from which theories and methods have been increasingly appropriated for examining how notions of heritage are constructed within society. The literature concerning memory and remembering in society is immense; studies of traumatic memory, national memory, memory and identity and memory and the individual have proliferated since the pathbreaking works that emerged in the 1980s. Assessing the applicability of these diverse works and the analysis of memory to heritage studies is paramount, but their multifarious nature remains a barrier to their wider usage. However, three more recent works which cast light on the nature of memory, its relationship to history and heritage and the ethical demands of remembering are provided by the three books under review. Remembering is considered in all these works to be an active choice by an individual or society, situated within a cultural and social context, bearing implications for

Remembering to forget?—the bbc abolition season and media memory of britain's transatlantic slave trade

Representations on British television and radio of the transatlantic slave trade have been minimal over the past 50 years. From occasional references in documentaries or period dramas, the media memory of the history and legacy of the British enslavement of Africans has been one of a distant, detached perspective; it occurred in another place and another time. The transmission of Roots in 1977 has seemed to provide the definitive account of the slave trade as several years followed the series before the subject was again considered as a subject worthy of note. Over the past decade, however, there have emerged a number of documentaries that sought to place the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade firmly within a British context. These programmes have highlighted the complicity of British institutions and the enormous wealth that was generated by the enslavement of Africans. The bicentenary of the 1807 Act passed by the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade gave a new focus for broadcasters to return to the topic. In response to efforts by the British Government in 2007 to make the bicentenary into an event to be marked, the BBC created what was termed ‘The Abolition Season’; a series of programmes on television and radio to mark the passing of the act. This output continued in some respects the revisionism of previous pieces but, significantly, it offered viewers a new memory of the transatlantic slave trade. This was a post-Roots memory, which admitted the involvement of Britain in the enslavement of Africans but which, however, still sought to emphasise the positive role of British abolitionists and the apparently more enlightened times we live in today. This was a media-memory for a

The Burial of the Dead: the British Army on the Western Front, 1914–18

Abstract This article examines the ‘war culture’ that developed within the British Army with regard to death and burial on the Western Front. Soldiers on the battlefields responded to the presence of death and the bodies of the dead through a specific framework that was used to understand this perverse and violent landscape. This drew upon pre-war practices and emphasized the physicality of the corpse in the desire to ensure a ‘decent’ burial for a ‘pal’.

Still fighting in the trenches: ‘War discourse’ and the memory of the First World War in Britain:

This article examines how the memory of the First World War (1914–1918) across Britain has been structured by the use of a specific ‘war discourse’. This means of communication draws upon the vast array of words, phrases and sayings that were popularised through the experience of large numbers of civilians in military service during the conflict. This lexicon has been subsequently incorporated into wider usage and retains a prominent place within cultural expression. However, rather than merely being used as an illustrative device, the ‘war discourse’ is employed to make specific references regarding both the past and the present within the political, media and public sphere, as issues of blame, responsibility and neglect are integral parts of its usage. Through the application of critical discourse analysis, the ‘war discourse’ can be observed as a significant means by which society remembers the Great War.

It still goes on: football and the heritage of the Great War in Britain

This article examines the museum displays and modern memorials that draw on the role of football and footballers in the history of the Great War in Britain. The place of football in the popular memory of the war in Britain is certainly significant at regional and national levels; from the stories of individual footballers and local teams signing up to fight for ‘King and Country’ to the more famous examples of soldiers kicking a football over no mans land at the Battle of Somme in 1916 and the football game played between opposing combatants during the Christmas Truce of 1914. Museums and memorial sites in Britain and on the former battlefields that reference and represent the place of the sport in the conflict provide places for tourists and pilgrims to remember and mourn these events and the dead. However, the manner in which these sites of memory frame the significance of the game in relationship to the war reveals wider assumptions about the contested memory of the conflict in Britain. Whilst the popular memory of the war focuses on the slaughter of the battlefields and the piteous futility of war, attempts at revising this perception have sought to emphasise the endeavour, commitment and achievement of soldiers. In this battlefield of memory, sports heritage serves as a lens through which issues of contemporary identity in Britain can be established and contested.

Sad shires and no man’s land: First World War frames of reference in the British media representation of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

The focus of this article is the manner in which media representations in Britain of the 21st century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drew upon the terms, allusions and imagery of the First World War. The application of these visual and textual frames of reference has been used to demonstrate the failings of government, the need for national support or the validation of anti-war perspectives. Through the use of a critical discourse analysis, this assessment will highlight how the war of 1914–1918 is used within contemporary Britain as a vehicle for political and social commentary upon the actions of authority. Despite being fought at the outset of the last century, the newspaper coverage of the British Army’s operation in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates how the First World War still goes on within sections of British society.

Curated decay: heritage beyond saving

The publication of Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving raises significant issues for both the practice of cultural heritage management and the pursuit of a critical heritage studies. In these reviews, DeSilvey’s work is engaged with on a methodological and theoretical basis to consider new ways in which we assess the role of decay and decomposition as an integral part of conservation and preservation. Central to DeSilvey’s argument is how we live with and through entropy which presents an entirely new relationship with our notions of heritage. Ruins and the fragility of the material remains of the past provided the initial impetus for the creation of institutional and legislative forms during the nineteenth and twentieth century that desired to arrest the loss of antiquities. The crumbling remnants of former eras has dominated the romantic imagination and shaped the societal relationships to the historic environment. Therefore, by moving towards a recognition of ‘curated decay’, we have an opportunity to reimagine disciplinary perspectives and to consider a far wider network of actors and agents, both human and non-human, within these events. This is the alternative ecology that DeSilvey presents, an approach to heritage studies that examines the persistence of decay as a product of natural and cultural circumstances. As Crouch and McCarthy make clear, this is an assessment that challenges our practice, performance, definition and recognition of ‘heritage’.