Pub Date : 2020-04-23DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2020.1751492
Bethan Bide
ABSTRACT Experiences of conflict rarely adhere to the historical confines of defined dates. Although the Second World War was officially brought to a close on 2 September 1945, the emotional legacy of the conflict lingered. Drawing on objects from the Museum of London, this article investigates how fashion objects can be used to highlight the long-term impacts of conflict. By looking at how people reused, saved, and fetishized wartime objects in peacetime, it shows how emotional reactions of hope, disappointment, and lingering resentment manifested themselves through practices of dressing, as well as demonstrating the uneven impact of conflict across class and gender boundaries.
{"title":"In their shoes: using fashion objects to explore the duration and complexity of wartime experiences","authors":"Bethan Bide","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2020.1751492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2020.1751492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Experiences of conflict rarely adhere to the historical confines of defined dates. Although the Second World War was officially brought to a close on 2 September 1945, the emotional legacy of the conflict lingered. Drawing on objects from the Museum of London, this article investigates how fashion objects can be used to highlight the long-term impacts of conflict. By looking at how people reused, saved, and fetishized wartime objects in peacetime, it shows how emotional reactions of hope, disappointment, and lingering resentment manifested themselves through practices of dressing, as well as demonstrating the uneven impact of conflict across class and gender boundaries.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"418 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2020.1751492","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45548899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-03DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2020.1745473
Francesca Burke
ABSTRACT The sovereign nation-state remains the taken-for-granted setting for museums, which are conventionally understood as public institutions that collate and preserve objects, and make collections accessible to visitors. Given these expectations, the Palestinian Museum offers an intriguing case study in a growing body of research on the relationship between museums and international relations. In 2016, the Palestinian Museum opened in the West Bank without a collection and with an admission that, due to the Israeli occupation, many Palestinians would not be able to reach the building. This article proposes that the museum initiative and the experiences it has entailed illustrate activism under occupation, and the challenge this activism makes to Israel’s policies of control and erasure has been visible in three key ways. Firstly, the museum asserts a visible national presence in an environment where the everyday lives of Palestinians and Palestinian ambitions for independence are severely constrained. Secondly, the museum staff have used the lack of a collection to draw international attention to the Israeli occupation and policies of settlement, expropriation, and control. And thirdly, in its programme and stated ambitions, the museum’s designers have given wide scope to their imagined audience and the Palestinian national community, with a view to enhancing a transnational arena for activism.
{"title":"Exhibiting activism at the Palestinian Museum","authors":"Francesca Burke","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2020.1745473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2020.1745473","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The sovereign nation-state remains the taken-for-granted setting for museums, which are conventionally understood as public institutions that collate and preserve objects, and make collections accessible to visitors. Given these expectations, the Palestinian Museum offers an intriguing case study in a growing body of research on the relationship between museums and international relations. In 2016, the Palestinian Museum opened in the West Bank without a collection and with an admission that, due to the Israeli occupation, many Palestinians would not be able to reach the building. This article proposes that the museum initiative and the experiences it has entailed illustrate activism under occupation, and the challenge this activism makes to Israel’s policies of control and erasure has been visible in three key ways. Firstly, the museum asserts a visible national presence in an environment where the everyday lives of Palestinians and Palestinian ambitions for independence are severely constrained. Secondly, the museum staff have used the lack of a collection to draw international attention to the Israeli occupation and policies of settlement, expropriation, and control. And thirdly, in its programme and stated ambitions, the museum’s designers have given wide scope to their imagined audience and the Palestinian national community, with a view to enhancing a transnational arena for activism.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"360 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2020.1745473","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43321521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1613085
S. Grant
ABSTRACT America’s Civil War is often identified as the instigator of a new, industrial discipline that replaced the individualism of the antebellum era. Its traditional narrative trajectory is one of consolidation and cooperation that emphasizes the emergence of order from the chaos of conflict and the ordering of idealized, individual masculine bodies in the service of an equally glorified national body. This article complicates contemporary assumptions pertaining to gender, martial manhood, and national health in a wartime context. Juxtaposing the reports produced by Draft Board doctors in the later years of the conflict against a selection of nursing memoirs, it examines the ways in which elite assumptions about national health and military preparedness were challenged by the intimate realities of the war. It explores the tensions revealed through the federal draft between voluntarism and coercion, and the resultant shift from intimacy to estrangement in the later years of the conflict. It reveals that the points of intimacy between strangers effected by the Civil War were not always positive or supportive. Too often they were controlling confrontations that challenge the national narrative that has for so long pertained in the case of America’s mid-nineteenth century civil conflict.
{"title":"The kindness of strangers: soldiers, surgeons, civilians, and conflict intimacies in the American Civil War","authors":"S. Grant","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2019.1613085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1613085","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT America’s Civil War is often identified as the instigator of a new, industrial discipline that replaced the individualism of the antebellum era. Its traditional narrative trajectory is one of consolidation and cooperation that emphasizes the emergence of order from the chaos of conflict and the ordering of idealized, individual masculine bodies in the service of an equally glorified national body. This article complicates contemporary assumptions pertaining to gender, martial manhood, and national health in a wartime context. Juxtaposing the reports produced by Draft Board doctors in the later years of the conflict against a selection of nursing memoirs, it examines the ways in which elite assumptions about national health and military preparedness were challenged by the intimate realities of the war. It explores the tensions revealed through the federal draft between voluntarism and coercion, and the resultant shift from intimacy to estrangement in the later years of the conflict. It reveals that the points of intimacy between strangers effected by the Civil War were not always positive or supportive. Too often they were controlling confrontations that challenge the national narrative that has for so long pertained in the case of America’s mid-nineteenth century civil conflict.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"140 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2019.1613085","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46115745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1612151
A. Carden‐Coyne
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the impact of modern war on haptic sensations and rehabilitation culture aimed at healing physical and psychological wounds. It examines the haptic senses in occupational therapy and in the vocational retraining of the blind as masseurs and physiotherapists. Military patients’ creative responses to rehabilitation form a key part of the discussion, responding to the pressure to overcome painful wounds and disabilities. While much recent scholarship has focused on the re-masculinizing purpose and industrial discourse underpinning rehabilitation (either in returning to the frontline or to usefulness and economic production), this paper examines the haptic dimension of men’s handicrafts and other sensory elements within rehabilitation. It highlights the role of nature in rehabilitation and in personal responses to a war injury, through the pervasive symbol of the butterfly, found in diverse cultural arenas from therapeutic handicrafts to war memorials. It explores how nature enabled wounded soldiers to escape from the horror of industrial scale, mechanized wounding and considers whether the butterfly emblem resonated among men for its fragile beauty, which acted as a form of soft resistance to the disciplinary aspects of rehabilitation and the brutality of the war more generally. I argue that this was linked to the wider cultural effort to explain the impact of modern war on the human sensory experience through the enigmatic butterfly.
{"title":"Butterfly touch: rehabilitation, nature and the haptic arts in the First World War","authors":"A. Carden‐Coyne","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2019.1612151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1612151","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper investigates the impact of modern war on haptic sensations and rehabilitation culture aimed at healing physical and psychological wounds. It examines the haptic senses in occupational therapy and in the vocational retraining of the blind as masseurs and physiotherapists. Military patients’ creative responses to rehabilitation form a key part of the discussion, responding to the pressure to overcome painful wounds and disabilities. While much recent scholarship has focused on the re-masculinizing purpose and industrial discourse underpinning rehabilitation (either in returning to the frontline or to usefulness and economic production), this paper examines the haptic dimension of men’s handicrafts and other sensory elements within rehabilitation. It highlights the role of nature in rehabilitation and in personal responses to a war injury, through the pervasive symbol of the butterfly, found in diverse cultural arenas from therapeutic handicrafts to war memorials. It explores how nature enabled wounded soldiers to escape from the horror of industrial scale, mechanized wounding and considers whether the butterfly emblem resonated among men for its fragile beauty, which acted as a form of soft resistance to the disciplinary aspects of rehabilitation and the brutality of the war more generally. I argue that this was linked to the wider cultural effort to explain the impact of modern war on the human sensory experience through the enigmatic butterfly.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"176 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2019.1612151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46092206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1663683
L. Noakes
ABSTRACT In her work The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry discusses what she has termed ‘the referential instability‘ of the human body in death. The dead of war, she argues, have a particular, historically specific, instability, in that their bodies can be of immense emotional value to their nation, but can also be fought over and disputed; the subject of competing claims from nation, family and enemy. In Second World War Britain the bodies of dead combatants, for long the subject of state regulation and familial and comradely grief, were joined by the bodies of dead civilians. This article examines the ways in which the British state attempted to regulate the disposal of the bodies of both civilians and combatants in a manner which conferred the sense of honour and sacrifice, largely successfully attached to the dead of the battlefield since the First World War, to the bodies of civilians killed in the new form of warfare, aerial bombardment. It sets this against a discussion of the treatment of the combatant dead and examines expressions of grief, and the regulation of these in both civilian and combatant contexts, arguing that in ’total war’ the state struggled to ensure the stability of both the civilian and combatant corpse.
{"title":"Valuing the dead: death, burial, and the body in Second World War Britain","authors":"L. Noakes","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2019.1663683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1663683","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In her work The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry discusses what she has termed ‘the referential instability‘ of the human body in death. The dead of war, she argues, have a particular, historically specific, instability, in that their bodies can be of immense emotional value to their nation, but can also be fought over and disputed; the subject of competing claims from nation, family and enemy. In Second World War Britain the bodies of dead combatants, for long the subject of state regulation and familial and comradely grief, were joined by the bodies of dead civilians. This article examines the ways in which the British state attempted to regulate the disposal of the bodies of both civilians and combatants in a manner which conferred the sense of honour and sacrifice, largely successfully attached to the dead of the battlefield since the First World War, to the bodies of civilians killed in the new form of warfare, aerial bombardment. It sets this against a discussion of the treatment of the combatant dead and examines expressions of grief, and the regulation of these in both civilian and combatant contexts, arguing that in ’total war’ the state struggled to ensure the stability of both the civilian and combatant corpse.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"224 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2019.1663683","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44741051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1631727
Rachel Bates
ABSTRACT This article explores Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s little-known photographs of wounded soldiers taken during the Crimean War (1854–1856). These images are an important source in the history of war representation, following Charles Bell’s vivid paintings of gunshot wounds in the wake of the Battle of Waterloo and preceding World War One images of facial mutilation. Commissioned by Queen Victoria during her publicized visits to military hospitals at Chatham and kept for posterity in a royal album entitled ‘Crimean Portraits 1854–6ʹ, Cundall and Howlett’s photographs reveal the monarchy’s close interest in the wounded. I explore royal motives for memorializing rank and file soldiers and their injuries, arguing that the images are shaped by humanitarian and medical interests, as well as royal desire to commemorate survival and bodily resilience. I consider the photographs alongside contemporary reports and prints in newspapers and medical journals depicting the wounded, to give a sense of the cultural significance of the wounded soldier during the Crimean War. By situating Cundall and Howlett’s photographs against the political and emotional conflicts of the war and examining the representation of the individual sufferer, I ask to what extent they participate in, and challenge, wider narratives of healing.
{"title":"Exposing wounds: Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s royal assignment","authors":"Rachel Bates","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2019.1631727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1631727","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s little-known photographs of wounded soldiers taken during the Crimean War (1854–1856). These images are an important source in the history of war representation, following Charles Bell’s vivid paintings of gunshot wounds in the wake of the Battle of Waterloo and preceding World War One images of facial mutilation. Commissioned by Queen Victoria during her publicized visits to military hospitals at Chatham and kept for posterity in a royal album entitled ‘Crimean Portraits 1854–6ʹ, Cundall and Howlett’s photographs reveal the monarchy’s close interest in the wounded. I explore royal motives for memorializing rank and file soldiers and their injuries, arguing that the images are shaped by humanitarian and medical interests, as well as royal desire to commemorate survival and bodily resilience. I consider the photographs alongside contemporary reports and prints in newspapers and medical journals depicting the wounded, to give a sense of the cultural significance of the wounded soldier during the Crimean War. By situating Cundall and Howlett’s photographs against the political and emotional conflicts of the war and examining the representation of the individual sufferer, I ask to what extent they participate in, and challenge, wider narratives of healing.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"118 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2019.1631727","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41597197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1612143
E. Rosenhaft
ABSTRACT In the growing scholarship on marginalia, relatively little attention has been given to their function in military memoirs. This article proposes that modern military marginalia have a quality of their own, if we accept Yuval Noah Harari’s diagnosis of a ‘modern war culture’ emerging from the concurrent developments of an expanding book market and a post-Enlightenment epistemology that attributes special significance to the experience and remembrance of war. In the light of this ambivalent quality of modernity, the military annotator can be seen as a ‘guerrilla memoirist’, re-appropriating the intimate conversation among combatants in tacit challenge to the commodification and marketization of their shared experience. The article draws on historical examples of military marginalia and on Lewis Hyde’s account of the gift relationship to contextualize a case study: the annotations (including a pasted-in trench map) made by an American First World War veteran in a copy of Storm of Steel, the 1929 American edition of Ernst Jünger’s best-selling war memoir In Stahlgewittern.
在日益增长的关于旁注的学术研究中，它们在军事回忆录中的作用相对较少受到关注。如果我们接受尤瓦尔·诺亚·赫拉利(Yuval Noah Harari)对“现代战争文化”的诊断，即现代军事旁注有其自身的品质，这种“现代战争文化”来自于不断扩大的图书市场和后启蒙认识论的同时发展，后者将战争的经历和记忆赋予了特殊的意义。鉴于现代性的这种矛盾性质，军事注释者可以被视为“游击回忆录作者”，重新挪用了战斗人员之间的亲密对话，对他们共同经验的商品化和市场化进行了隐性挑战。这篇文章借鉴了历史上军事旁注的例子，以及刘易斯·海德(Lewis Hyde)对礼物关系的描述，为一个案例研究提供了背景:一位美国第一次世界大战老兵在一本《钢铁风暴》(Storm of Steel)中所做的注释(包括一张粘贴的战壕地图)。《钢铁风暴》是恩斯特·约恩格尔(Ernst jenger) 1929年最畅销的战争回忆录《在Stahlgewittern》的美国版。
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Pub Date : 2020-02-24DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2020.1730126
C. Åse
ABSTRACT How do state monuments secure public consent to war efforts? This article examines the official military monuments constructed in Berlin in 2009 and Stockholm in 2013 in reaction to Germany’s and Sweden’s participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (2001–2014). Monuments express powerful truth claims and participate in the reproduction and transformation of war-justificatory narratives. By comparing the Berlin and Stockholm monuments, the article demonstrates their engagement with national identities and historical experience and their management of gendered military ideals. The Swedish monument Restare by sculptor Monica Dennis Larsen is white and human-sized, has an organic shape and sits in a pastoral setting, while architect Andreas Meck’s massive and austere German Ehrenmal der Bundeswehr is strictly rectangular and placed near military buildings. The article’s comparative analysis foregrounds the planning, names and dedications, locations, and designs of the monuments and the specific ways that they address individual death. A central conclusion is that these monuments repress gendered war histories and the masculinization of the armed forces. Restare disallows Sweden’s historical experience of gendered militarization and bolsters the country’s peace identity so that contemporary military violence appears publicly acceptable. The Bundeswehr monument forestalls linkages between Germany’s contemporary military identity and the country’s history of authoritarian regimes. By invoking neither military masculinity nor the feminized homeland, the monument orchestrates the separation of contemporary military activity from that in the German past.
国家纪念碑如何确保公众对战争努力的同意?本文考察了2009年在柏林和2013年在斯德哥尔摩建造的官方军事纪念碑，以回应德国和瑞典参与阿富汗国际安全援助部队(ISAF)(2001-2014)。纪念碑表达了强大的真理主张，并参与了战争辩护叙事的复制和转化。通过比较柏林和斯德哥尔摩的纪念碑，文章展示了他们对国家身份和历史经验的参与，以及他们对性别军事理想的管理。雕塑家Monica Dennis Larsen设计的瑞典Restare纪念碑是白色的，和人类一样大，有一个有机的形状，坐落在田园环境中，而建筑师Andreas Meck设计的德国Ehrenmal der Bundeswehr是严格的矩形，靠近军事建筑。文章的比较分析突出了纪念碑的规划、名称和奉献、位置和设计，以及它们解决个人死亡的具体方式。一个中心结论是，这些纪念碑压制了战争历史的性别化和武装部队的男性化。Restare否定了瑞典性别军事化的历史经验，并支持该国的和平认同，使当代军事暴力似乎可以被公众接受。德国联邦国防军纪念碑预示着德国当代军事身份与该国专制政权历史之间的联系。这座纪念碑既没有唤起军人的男子气概，也没有唤起女性化的家园，它协调了当代军事活动与德国过去军事活动的分离。
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Pub Date : 2020-02-17DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2020.1729617
Henrique Tavares Furtado
ABSTRACT In the last 30 years, South American scholars and activists have produced a wealth of knowledge and representations practices concerning militarism and mass atrocities committed by the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, this body of work has been relatively neglected by debates in the field of Critical Military Studies (CMS). This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing an analysis of the Resistance Memorial of São Paulo (RM-SP), a site inaugurated in 2009 in the former headquarters of the Brazilian political police. The analysis is based on short-term visits to the RM-SP in 2014 and 2018 and informal conversations with members of staff. The paper makes two central arguments: first, as a site of memory situated in the Global South and with strong links to survivors, the RM-SP invites radical accounts of political violence, pushing the boundaries of the concept of militarism beyond what is normally contemplated in CMS. Second, drawing on poststructuralist and post-Marxian critiques, the paper argues that the RM-SP is also a site of struggles; a space in which a radical narrative is held back by a certain language (a system of equivalences) that provides symbolic legitimacy to the present (neo)liberal order. On one hand, the RM-SP offers an intricate analysis of political violence that disturbs traditional liberal accounts of civic-military relations. On the other, its compelling representations of resistance are constantly threatened by the risk of commodification; the confusion between the values of past struggles and that which makes them exchangeable in the eyes of the present.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-17DOI: 10.1080/23337486.2020.1716560
N. Caddick
‘Home’ is a word soaked in feeling. It calls forth memories, emotions, attachment to a place that one belongs. For me, home feels warm; I am lucky. When a poem tells of home’s destruction, that poem stirs colder feelings. Sadness, but not tears – my home is still intact, and the loss is not personal enough. Anger at ‘you who’ve destroyed’, and at the drones and tanks that blast away the homes of others. A sense that longing for justice, or more darkly, revenge, might under such circumstances feel irrepressible or overpowering. War art, like poems spoken by Pashtun women in Afghanistan, can tell our emotions things we did not know about war. For some time, this piece was titled ‘The other side of Western war’. I’d wanted to express an attempt to move beyond soldier-centric understandings of the recent war in Afghanistan, to imagine how it might be lived by Afghans. Eventually, I changed the title, unsatisfied with my designation of the war as ‘Western’ and thus belonging to ‘us’. The question I wish to pose, clearer now than it was when I started, is this: can art, poetry, in this case, break down the binaries that cleave apart the humans of war into separable categories like ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘grievable’ and ‘un-grievable’ (Bulter 2010)? My posing this question follows eight years’ critical study of veterans’ stories. During this time I’ve interviewed dozens of British veterans and heard tales of trauma and injury. I’ve watched films and documentaries, and read memoirs by veterans narrating their wartime experiences. I’ve listened to podcasts, seen theatre productions, and heard veterans-as-researchers telling auto-ethnographic stories about war and its aftermath. Whatever understanding of war and its legacy I have cobbled together over the duration of this work has been grounded in the experiences and perspectives of military veterans. Despite my immersion in stories of war, in particular of the UK’s longest and most recent war in Afghanistan, I feel ignorant of how war has effected the people who are subjected to our military violence. Afghans do, of course, feature in British soldier narratives of the war, but rarely if ever do they appear as fully rounded characters with needs, desires, and stories of their own. Instead they are ‘flat’ characters in the Western war narrative,
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