The Visualising War podcast has recently been exploring the representation of war in museum spaces. In particular, we have been talking to curators at the Imperial War Museums about their recent redesign of their WWI and WWII Galleries. You can listen to two podcast episodes discussing each set of galleries here and here. In this blog, we feature a selection of objects chosen by curators Vikki Hawkins and Kate Clements to illustrate their approach to narrating WWII.
Total War Theme:
Chinese Air Raid Shelter Admission Ticket from Chongqing, 1942 Facsimile loan from The Three Gorges Museum, Chongqing, China
Case studies and objects are used in the new WWII Galleries to highlight several recurring themes, including Total War (the way the war affected all areas of life) and Global War (its repercussions around the globe).
IWM holds a large amount of material culture recording experiences of the Blitz and these recognisable objects have the capacity to invoke memory and encourage intergenerational discussions between visitors. IWM has capitalised on the relative familiarity of these Blitz objects to explore more transnational experiences of war, including the experience of aerial attacks in other parts of the globe.
The display of a Chinese air raid shelter admission ticket and images of people and places affected by bombing in Chongqing helps to bring a marginalised aspect of the Second World War into a prominent public space, deliberately establishing parallels with the better known British experience. The new Galleries also display a German civilian fireman’s jacket, and an ARP medical case and blackout propaganda from other parts of the world. In a section looking at the bombing of Japan, a flag indicating the site of the closest water supply has been used to reflect air raid precautions there.
Personal Story Approach
Micrometer belonging to Louie White
The new WWII Galleries feature approximately 100 unique stories from individuals across the globe. In many cases, these stories are accompanied by a contemporaneous photograph of the individual and an object associated with their experiences during the conflict. Through this personal story approach, visitors can appreciate the diversity of the people involved and the variety of emotional and physical responses they had to the war, be that pain, suffering, loss, resistance, strength, love, separation, freedom and political awakening. The people featured in the galleries help provide visitors with connections to the past and encourage reflection on their own choices or responses to the challenges individuals faced.
Louie White’s story speaks to the mobilisation of women for the war effort in Britain from 1941. Louie trained at the Leeds Mechanical Institute as a milling machine operator and in 1942 went to work at the Blackburn Aircraft Factory. Her boss George was impressed with her ability to check the dimensions of aircraft parts using precision measurement tools like this micrometer. Louie was promoted to inspector and bought her own micrometer. George engraved her name on it, and she proudly carried it in her pocket at work for the next three and a half years. Louie’s collection of personal papers (including her workbooks from Leeds Mechanical Institute and her diaries) were donated to the Imperial War Museum in 1982. Her story helps to bring alive the transformative impact of the war on women, and it reflects the museum’s determination that women’s experiences are embedded in the wider narrative of the war.
Global War and people-centric gallery themes:
Helmet liner worn by US soldier on D-Day External loan, courtesy of the West Point Museum Collection, U.S. Army Museum Enterprise; Photograph from Harry’s son, Curtis
Harry D Evans was a combat medic in the US 4th Infantry Division. He wore this helmet liner when he landed with the third wave of troops to go ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day. Before the invasion, Harry took part in a rehearsal off the Devon coast. Poor communication and an accidental encounter with German fast attack boats resulted in 749 US servicemen being killed. Harry was awarded the Bronze Star with ‘V’ for valour for helping wounded men during this disaster.
D-Day is among the best-known events of the Second World War, particularly in the US and Britain. However, the Imperial War Museums’ collections have very few objects linked to the international nature of Operation Overlord, particularly the US and Canada’s role in the landings.
The D-Day story is told in the new galleries within a single showcase, placed in front of a large AV screen showing footage of the landings. It deliberately highlights the international aspect of D-Day, and tells the story via five people, one for each of the D-Day beaches. This allows a complex story to come alive in accessible ways.
The IWM’s existing collections provided two strong people-focused stories and related objects for the two British beaches, Gold and Sword. However, for the other three beaches, new material was needed. A collection of uniform, documents and other items belonging to a US Navy officer from Omaha Beach came up for auction and IWM was able to purchase it; other items relating to Juno and Utah beaches were borrowed from museums and archives in Canada and the US, with family members supplying additional testimony and photographs. Each of the men whose stories represent the five beaches had a different role on D-Day; there is a US Army medic, a beachmaster, an British Army chaplain, a war artist and an infantry soldier. This range of stories helps visitors to understand that there was no single D-Day experience, and that it was a vast operation that involved many different people in different roles.
Post-war ripples:
Raminder Parkash Singh
When Raminder Parkash Singh married Indian war hero Parkash in April 1947, they both wore this bright palla (headscarf). Just four months later, they fled their home when India was partitioned. As Sikhs, they left the newly created Islamic country of Pakistan in order to avoid the religious violence that accompanied the partition.Raminder and Parkash barely escaped with their lives. They witnessed the bloodshed as millions of people of different religions crossed the new border. They migrated eastwards to a new farm, arriving with a tawa (cooking pan) but few other possessions.
The palla (headscarf) worn at Raminder and Parkash’s wedding in April 1947
The role of the British Empire in the war is explained throughout the new WWII galleries, including the contribution of India to Britain’s war effort and the growing Indian independence movement. In the final, post-war gallery, the culmination of this story is told, with a focus on the decline of British imperial power and the independence and subsequent Partition of India.
As in other areas, IWM’s existing collections did not support much of the narrative in this post-war gallery, and Raminder’s objects and story are just a few of many new items that were carefully sourced and collected in order to represent as many global themes and events as possible.
Raminder’s tawa (cooking pan)
Raminder’s tawa is perhaps an unlikely item for display in a war museum, but it now sits alongside her palla, telling the story of the perilous journey which the newly married couple had to make to their new home in northern India. The Victoria Cross which Raminder’s husband won during WWII is on display elsewhere in the IWM. This combination of military and domestic objects (generously shared by Raminder and Parkash’s family) tells a powerful story that many IWM visitors will be unfamiliar with, capturing the ripple effects of a conflict which sparked more conflict, as well as the global nature of the war.
The IWM’s new WWII Galleries opened on 20th October 2021. Together with colleague Paul Cornish, curators Vikki Hawkins and Kate Clements have edited a new book to coincide with the opening: Total War: A People’s History of World War II(Thames&Hudson). We strongly recommend it!
Jana Mauri Marlborough is a third-year student in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews. She recently worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant on the Visualising War project, to support a new strand of research into how ancient warfare is taught and assessed in schools. This research is still in its very early stages, but in the following blog Jana outlines some of her initial findings, based on her analysis of Scottish school curricula, some interviews with school teachers, and a survey which you can find (and fill in!) here.
Key findings:
The teaching of historical wars in Scotland is often quite insular and Britain/Scotland-centered.
War takes a back seat in Scottish curricula relative to other aspects of history, and even at Advanced Higher it is studied less for its own sake and more as part of wider social/political history topics.
The curriculum and assessments encourage a considerably more empathic approach to the study of fictional wars than to the study of historical wars.
Teachers themselves often go above and beyond the prescribed curricula/their duties to add a more human/humanising element to the study of historical wars; they need more support in this.
‘Ancient warfare has always been one of my favourite subjects within Ancient History. When the opportunity to apply for an undergraduate research position within the Visualising War project came along, I felt that it was the perfect opportunity to sharpen my research skills and help Dr König in her fascinating project. I was delighted to be selected along with my colleague Anna Coopey and eager to get to work.
My role in this project consisted of two distinct tasks; analysing the Classical Studies and Modern History curricula for Scottish secondary schools and comparing them to understand how warfare is being taught in Scottish schools. Scotland has only one education board, the SQA, and their website is the sole source I used for this part of my research. The other half of the project focused on distributing a survey for education professionals and scheduling interviews with secondary school teachers – which proved rather difficult, since we were working around the start of term dates in Scotland and teachers were super busy!
At the very start of my long journey of looking at curriculum specifications, I bumped into something that caught my attention. Bearing in mind that I was not educated in Britain myself, I was somewhat surprised to see how British-focused the curricula were. To learn that World War I is taught as part of the Scottish History curriculum and not World History left me almost speechless. This insularity is reflected within Classical Studies as well, where one of the recurring themes is Roman Britain, with the Boudican Revolt featuring as one of the two wars included in the curriculum up to Higher level.
Generally speaking, the Scottish Classical Studies curriculum is not, at least on paper, particularly focused on teaching war. It offers a combination of socio-political and religious themes, from Athenian democracy to life in Pompeii, and addresses those subjects rather broadly in its initial three years (N3, N4, and N5). The curriculum becomes considerably more robust in year 6, with the Advanced Higher course. It is in year 6 that pupils make a considerable knowledge jump and are introduced to some material that is also reviewed in sub-honours university courses.
Even so, while war gets a lot more airtime in Advanced Higher compared with at other levels, it is never given centre stage. Instead, it appears to be relegated to a supporting role in the teaching of contemporary historiography and ancient literature.
In Advanced Higher, students become closely acquainted with the likes of Herodotus and Livy and look at multiple accounts of the Trojan War, including Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad. It was through looking at the Advanced Higher curriculum that I observed something disconcerting: when working with historiography depicting real wars, the main goal of the course seemed to be the analysis of contemporary sources and its setbacks from a historian’s point of view, while the study of fictional wars came with a considerably more empathetic approach. Past papers suggest that when fictional wars were being studied, the impacts of warfare were more broadly considered, going beyond the wellbeing and struggles faced by soldiers to shed light on how their absence and the uncertainty of their fate were felt by the loved ones that they left behind and their communities. This emphasis (and the equivalent gap in the study of historical wars) chimed with my colleague Anna Coopey’s findings for the English curricula.
Despite curriculum limitations, I was pleased to find out that teachers are very much committed to an empathetic approach when teaching pupils about war and often promote classroom activities that help pupils understand the impacts of war in their communities. One of our interviewees, a Modern History teacher from Falkirk, mentioned that practices such as bringing veterans into the classroom, organising class trips to battle sites and war cemeteries, and using class time to discuss ethical issues surrounding warfare are some of the tactics he uses in his classroom to separate real war from Call of Duty idealisations that pupils might have, allowing for a more realistic view of war and its lasting impact on families and communities.
Teachers also mentioned that, however helpful, those activities are, they are not part of the SQA curriculum, and it is ultimately up to the teachers’ availability and generosity to organise such events. In fact, teachers often must resort to using class time within other social disciplines, such as Religious and Moral Studies, to have these conversations surrounding the morality of war, as well as spending their own free time organising and conducting field trips and other activities, since (according to them) the curricula can be somewhat restrictive, especially in upper years, where the main goal of the course is to prepare pupils for exams.
Having a vested interest in both ancient warfare and education, I started my research with certain biases and preconceptions, perhaps expecting to find a lot more glorification of raw masculinity and militarism than I actually did. Instead, I encountered something completely different but perhaps as alarming. The rigidity of the curriculum and its emphasis on examinations and technical knowledge seem to have replaced a comprehensive approach to the teaching of History, ancient or modern. Along with that, the insularity of the curriculum, and the apparent absence of empathy shown in the SQA specifications when addressing real wars, are the most concerning points I encountered in my research.
On to the more positive side: teachers are fully aware of the need to connect pupils with the humane side of History and provide them with experiences that encourage empathy, despite being limited by the curricula on what they can and cannot do. For children to understand the impacts of war, whether today or in ancient times, the curricula must have space for shared experiences that foster empathy and not just mechanically focus on analysing ancient text and writing exams.’
Together with Anna’s findings, Jana’s analysis of school curricula and interviews with school teachers will inform the Visualising War project’s wider research into how war/wars are taught in schools at all levels and in different parts of the world. This research is an important strand of our work looking at the habits of visualising war which children and young people form as they grow up. In time, we hope to speak to many more teachers, curriculum designers, qualifications authorities and pupils, and to co-produce some materials in consultation with them which will support their work.
Our survey for school teachers remains open: if you have experience of teaching any kind of war or conflict in schools, please do fill it in. Thank you!
Anna Coopey is a third-year student in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews. She recently worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant on the Visualising War project (alongside Jana Mauri Marlborough), to support a new strand of research looking at how ancient warfare is taught and assessed in schools. This research is still in its very early stages, but in the following blog Anna outlines some of her initial findings, based on her analysis of school curricula, some interviews with school teachers, and a survey which you can find (and fill in!) here.
Key findings:
While some curricula include a ‘human costs’ aspect in the study of ancient warfare and encourage pupils to look at it from civilian and not just military perspectives, assessments tend to focus on armies/tactics/military prowess.
More crossover between how fictional and historical wars are taught/assessed would be valuable.
Teachers often try to make connections between ancient wars and modern conflicts, and one particular benefit of this is to humanise ancient victims of war.
‘This month, I’ve been working with The Visualising War Project to investigate the ways in which modern and ancient wars are taught in schools. It was quite a daunting project to undertake, full of interviews with loaded questions and plenty of debate on the nature of war and its importance in our society – but, after hours of poring over curricula and specifications, sending out survey links and having some lovely chats with some very insightful people over Zoom, I feel myself somewhat qualified to talk a little bit about what I’ve found.
My side of the project was focused on the English curriculum and specifications from the ages of 11 to 18, particularly in the subject areas of Classical Civilisation, Ancient History, and Modern History GCSE and A-Level, as well as KS3 study. As many Classicists will be aware, the dwindling nature of our subject in secondary schools has meant that only one exam board – OCR – offers the first two of these subjects, so I spent a lot of time on their website and found some rather interesting things!
Perhaps the most notable thing I discovered was in the GCSE specification, in which there is an optional module called War & Warfare. On page 26 of their specification, OCR writes the following:
‘War is one of the most significant aspects of human behaviour, and war and warfare in the classical world holds an endless and compelling fascination. This component highlights different aspects of warfare in the ancient world, including the purposes, conduct and effects of war, as well as how the military interacted with, and impacted upon, wider society.’
Of course, when I read this, I was ecstatic – and the more I read of the specification, the better it seemed to get. The main exam board of Classical Civilisation in England was encouraging engagement with the negative effects of war, not only on soldiers, but also on other impacted groups, such as women, children, and civilians.
Then, I got to the exam papers.
While OCR seems to encourage critical engagement with the effects of war from the outset, and to advocate a new approach to teaching ancient warfare that echoes the approach in Modern History (with a focus on what the wars did to people rather than which weapons were used), when it came to the assessments a different picture emerged. Because GCSE exams tend to focus on assessing knowledge rather than analysis and evaluation (which are more of a feature at A Level), this kind of question remain common in the War and Warfare Sample Question Paper: ‘Compare and contrast the Spartan army with either that of Athens or of Rome. Which do you think was better?’ Rather than encouraging empathy with the suffering that these wars would have put people through – these actual, historical wars – the exams seem to encourage us to evaluate their tactics and military success, which seems, to me, a little tone-deaf. (This chimed with what my colleague Jana Mauri Marlborough found during her analysis of equivalent Scottish curricula.)
Of course, there are exceptions, and there are some questions which invite empathy and sympathy from the students taking them. For example, in the War and Warfare paper from June 2019, this question was asked: ‘Give two ways that Virgil creates sympathy for the victims of war’. But there is one notable difference here: the wars depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid are fictional, whereas the wars that the Spartan, Athenian, and Roman armies fought in were not. There is an encouragement to sympathise with fictional warriors that is entirely missing from questions surrounding actual, historical war, and it is this absence of empathy with real-life people that troubles me. The approximately 4000 dead Greeks and 20,000 dead Persians after the Battle of Thermopylae are just as much humans and deserving of sympathy as the fictional Patroclus and Hector, and Andromache and Hecuba, too.
I have spoken to many of my interviewees about this problem – about the disjunct in sympathy / empathy between our engagement with actual, historical ancient war and the fictional wars shown in Homer and Virgil – and many have suggested that this lack of empathy may be because of the lack of source material that gives sympathetic insights. Of course, this is true. As one interviewee remarked, ancient historians like Thucydides were not writing purely to entertain, so we should not expect pathos and sympathetic renderings to dominate ahead of facts. But perhaps the limitations of our sources simply call for more imagination in the ways that we teach war. Perhaps, in the absence of strong evidence, we should still make the effort to conjecture what could have been going on and how people might have experienced it. ‘Subjunctive history’, as Dakin calls it in Alan Bennett’s History Boys.
Another aspect of school-level war studies which caught my attention was the way in which teachers make lots of links to the modern day from their source material. One interviewee argued that if you are a Classics teacher and you don’t make references to the modern day in your teaching, something’s wrong. I would tend to agree! Teachers gave examples of how they tried to link up with contemporary events in their teaching, referencing for example the Troy exhibition at the British Museum in 2020, where performances were shown of Euripides’ Trojan Women by Syrian refugee women. Many mentioned what is currently going on in Afghanistan, and how they would link this to their teaching of the Iliad and Aeneid, and some linked Roman Republican politics to the political situation in the West from 2016 to January 2021.
Perhaps this is the way in which we can encourage more empathy in our students when studying ancient warfare. Perhaps, by cross-referencing ancient and modern situations where we have a variety of viewpoints and evidence, we can encourage budding Classicists to view the dead of the ancient battlefields just as emotionally as the dead of recent years – as people, not numbers, and as human beings, not statistics. This has benefits for understanding modern warfare as well as for ancient studies.
There is still some way to go in the way we teach ancient war, but I think empathy absolutely crucial: students need to see Pericles and Leonidas as just as much people as Churchill and Stalin to understand their wartime leadership, and they need to understand the horror of war outside of the prism of literature. They need to understand that war is just was devastating to the ancient man too. I would like to see more empathy encouraged in the teaching of ancient warfare in schools.’
Together with Jana’s findings, Anna’s analysis of school curricula and interviews with school teachers will inform the Visualising War project’s wider research into how war/wars – and conflict resolution and peacebuilding – are taught in schools at all levels and in different parts of the world. This research is an important strand of our work looking at the habits of visualising war which children and young people are encouraged to form as they grow up. In time, we hope to speak to many more teachers, curriculum designers, qualifications authorities and pupils, and to co-produce some materials in consultation with them which will enhance the ways in which pupils are taught to visualise both war and peace.
Our survey for school teachers remains open: if you have experience of teaching any kind of war or conflict in schools, please do fill it in. Thank you!
In my previous thought piece, I wrote that in order to understand – and, ultimately, change – how war is perpetuated in deed and thought, we must pay attention to war narratives. In this thought piece, I want to argue through the example of cosplay that conscious reproduction – which is to say, a deliberate use and/or retelling of a narrative – can be one such means of mitigation.
For many, our first and foremost encounter with war occurs through popular culture, whether that be games,[ii]blockbuster films, comic books, or hit TV. These stories help us make sense of the world and shape our attitude and behaviour in our encounters with it.[iii] As such, popular culture becomes myth in the Barthian sense, which is to say that they are stories that turn their ideas into invisible truths.[iv] In the case of popular culture, and as relates to Visualising War, these myths form our understandings of who commit what kinds of violence for which reasons.[v]
The concept of martial politics is useful here. This is the term put forward by Alison Howell to describe the always ongoing and shifting process by which gendered, racialised, queered and classed discourses and values can help maintain and further militarism – and all its attendant institutions and behaviours – as natural, normal, and desirable.[vi]
Let us take the 2011 film Thor as an example.[vii] The film, which is the first cinematic treatment of Marvel’s interpretation of the Norse gods and their home of Asgard,[viii] centres around the titular character Thor, the god of thunder, his brother Loki, the god of mischief, and their father Odin, whose godhood the film does not specify, but which ranged from war to poetry.[ix] The focus of the film is Thor’s journey from hubris and disgrace to worthiness, which he attains by his eventual preparedness to die to protect those ‘weaker’ than himself. The film figures these people as civilians, represented chiefly by two white women and an older white man.
For reasons of space, I will not here go into the mythologies and cultural contexts from which these characters stem. However, this is not to say that these are irrelevant; on the contrary, though its treatment of the mythology and culture of the Norse is at best deliberately unfaithful, the film makes more sense the more aware of these backgrounds the viewer is. What I will point to by way of context, is the burden of white nationalist appropriation of Viking imagery; a burden that the film does little to alleviate. With the exceptions of Idris Elba’s character Heimdall and Tadanobu Asano’s character Hogun, it is sadly devoid of speaking characters of colour.[x]As a consequence, in addition to the lack of representation, the film reiterates certain colonial gender notions: of white femininity as pure, domestic, and vulnerable, and of white masculinity as heroic, violent, and bearing the ‘burden’ of protection.
In this understanding of gender, there is no room for divergence from the binary; the characters of Thor and Loki are particularly good examples of this. Thor’s return to godhood is symbolised by his wielding of the hammer Mjølnir, which he uses to spectacular effect: when he fights, he dominates the entire landscape with lightning, tears it apart with wind and impact, and lets his hammer propel him through the skies.
Immagini
By contrast, Loki is slighter – a feature played up by the costuming, which makes his collars a little too wide – and fights with magic and throwing daggers, for which he is mocked. The only time Loki’s violence nears the same levels as Thor, he enacts it via machine weaponry, and it is decried as simultaneously excessive and cowardly. At the end of the film, he lies immobilised by Thor’s hammer on the Rainbow Bridge, which Thor subsequently destroys. The filmic depiction of Loki grants him a queered sort of monstrosity, but he is also canonically queer – genderfluid, pan/bisexual, and posthuman; the narrative significance of the defeat of such a character upon something called the Rainbow Bridge needs hardly be elaborated much further.[xi]
To be clear, I am not accusing the makers of this film of deliberately reinforcing trans- and homophobic, racist, and misogynistic martial politics. Moreover, by discussing the film on its own I am here ignoring the complexities introduced to the characters, places, and story through the film’s sequels.[xii] Nevertheless, by following certain tropes of storytelling about war and conflict – and the sorts of values associated with being a hero and a good soldier in such circumstances – the reiteration of these politics is the result. What is more interesting, arguably, is the use fans make of this story and its tropes, in particular through cosplay.
Cosplay (the word is a portmanteau of the words ‘costume’ and ‘play’) is the activity of making – recreating – and wearing the look of a particular character. The process encompasses hair, makeup, and costume, but also to a certain extent entails acting like the character in question. In other words, ‘[cosplaying] is a social parody-performance that situates the cosplayers bodily and affectively within popular culture narratives.’[xiii] Wearing cosplay entails the embrace of a specific otherness, whereby the cosplayer gains something of the feeling of what it is like to be that other. As such, it also fits into a long history of mask-wearing, masquerade, ritual, and costume, insofar as it is a process of transformation and liminality, where self is not quite self, and other is not quite other.[xiv]
It is in this sense that cosplay is an interesting example of exploring and questioning martial narratives, as the experience of being in cosplay means the cosplayer is exposed to other ways of being – and being received – in the world. Experience is not on its own trustworthy evidence, as it is always already politically entangled.[xv] At the same time, in terms of feeling out our identities, it is the only evidence we have. One must first be made aware of the ways in which the world is differentially accessible according to identity before one can do anything about it; cosplay is one way thing can be accomplished, small-scale and playful though it may be.
Moreover, in embodying the characters from these stories, cosplayers can put them to purposes counter to the politics of the original narrative. By putting themselves literally in the shoes of characters shaped by martial politics, cosplayers intervene in that direct line of meaning-making. This is their character now, their way of visualising their behaviour, meaning, and purpose, so that each instance of cosplay becomes a new retelling – an edge iteration, qua Butler,[xvi] that gives birth to a resignification, and that furthermore becomes sedimented in the body of the cosplayer as a potent potential.[xvii] It is as if the cosplayer says: ‘I will not imagine this character and this story in the way you’ve told me it must – I want it to be like this instead.’ This is cosplay sticking a branch into a wheel.[xviii]
Let us return to the story of Thor, and the character of Loki in particular. In cosplaying Loki, the cosplayer embodies and is able to take enjoyment in and feel empowered by all that queer ‘monstrosity;’ stepping into the ‘mask’ of that character lets the cosplayer feel with them, which consequently questions the film’s assumption of these traits being undesirable. In taking charge of that character – even for a few hours – the narrative around that character is claimed and given a different twist.
Another example, more briefly, is that of the character Sylvanas Windrunner, from the game World of Warcraft (2004-).[xix] She is a monstrous character, formed by trauma and extreme violence to become something as evil as that which harmed her.[xx] Sylvanas has no compunctions against the use of chemical weapons, and uses every conceivable advantage and disadvantage; she is not held back by any ‘arbitrary’ morals when it comes for fighting for what she wants and what she believes is the right cause.
It is fair to say that she embodies many of the othering anxieties the post-Cold War, ‘post-9/11 ‘West’[xxi] ascribes to the world: chaotic, war-prone and violent, feminine, deeply agential, and with no regard for established rules and norms.[xxii]To cosplay a character like Sylvanas, then, is to recognise the self in that other; to step into those shoes is to feel the hurt and the complexity of that story, and to destabilise the facile links between femininity, monstrosity, excessive violence, and irrationality (and over-emotionality). It is also to force a confrontation with one’s own enjoyment of such stories.
As Barthes put it, ‘the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn’.[xxiii] It is worth emphasising that cosplayers make an active and deep study of their chosen characters, gaining often acute insight into their motivations and behaviours. By understanding the narratives and making the choice to use them actively and, crucially, to different purposes, cosplayers are a good example of this; instead of only letting the story shape them, they also shape the story. Of course, cosplay is only a small example, and hardly presents a solution for the large-scale issue of martial politics. It is also important to note that not all cosplay is always resistant. Nevertheless, it is an encouraging example, as it shows that war stories can be twisted, and put on their heads, to become something empowering and something that engenders empathy, rather than suspicion and difference – even if that twisting occurs in small scales, in unserious spaces, through play.
Postdoctoral Researcher Katarina Birkedal obtained her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2019. She works on gendered experiences of conflict, manifestations of militarism in popular culture, and the aesthetics of depicted violence. She is using her experience of working across different disciplines and art forms to bring together members of the Visualising War research group who work in very different fields to enhance the project’s interdisciplinarity.
[i] The arguments of this piece are based on the research I conducted for my PhD thesis, Resistance, Reproduction, Attachment: Unsettling gender through cosplay, which was passed with no corrections in June 2019.
[ii] For more on war and games (and, more specifically, wargames), see the two special podcast episodes ‘Visualising Strategy’ and the accompanying blog post, co-produced with the Strategy Bridge-project here at the University of St Andrews.
[iii] See e.g. Kyle Grayson, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott, ‘Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture–World Politics Continuum’, Politics29, no. 3 (2009): 155–63.
[iv] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2009), 153-154,158.
[v] Katarina H.S. Birkedal, ‘Embodying a Perpetrator: Myths, Monsters and Magic’, in Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity, ed. Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Murer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 45–46.
[vi] The term ‘militarisation’ is also commonly used, however – as Howell pointed out – that term implies the existence of a pre- or post-militarised civilian utopia, which is not the case. It is also tuned almost solely to gendered discourses, to the exclusion of important intersectional aspects and experiences. Alison Howell, ‘Forget “Militarization”: Race, Disability and the “martial Politics” of the Police and of the University’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20, no. 2 (2018): 117–36; Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (London: University of California Press, 2000); Linda Åhäll, ‘The Dance of Militarisation: A Feminist Security Studies Take on “the Political”’, Critical Studies on Security 4, no. 2 (2016): 154–68; Katarina H.S. Birkedal, ‘Closing Traps: Emotional Attachment, Intervention, and Juxtaposition in Cosplay and IR’, Journal of International Political Theory, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219830112; Victoria M Basham, Aaron Belkin, and Jess Gifkins, ‘What Is Critical Military Studies?’, Critical Military Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–2.
[vii] Kenneth Branagh, Thor (Paramount Pictures & Marvel Studios, 2011). Many interesting things can be said about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, and the Thor film-series and Loki TV-series within that. Lack of space prevents extended discussion here.
[viii] It is actually ‘Åsgard,’ but in Marvel’s Americanised use most of the original terms are stripped of their proper spelling and pronunciation. This is perhaps a blessed simplification, given the proliferation of those ‘original’ terms due to the development of old Norse into several different languages. For example, Thor is Tor is Þórr is Þór, and so on. It also presents a good opportunity for distinguishing between the modern and old contexts.
[ix] The domains of Norse gods were wide and varied, often changing from place to place. Thor, Loki, and Odin are no exceptions to this; of these, it is Loki whose diverse responsibilities get most representation in Marvel’s canon – variably the god of mischief, lies, chaos, stories, and evil – but even these omit some aspects. Furthermore, due to the dangerous combination of the passage of time and the Christianisation of Scandinavia, many facets of Norse belief are lost to us today.
[x] I want to stress that a cast lacking in diversity is always a lack; this is also to say that the time and culture the film references was a lot more diverse that we give it credit for today.
[xi] For a more detailed analysis of this film, and of Loki in particular, please see Birkedal, ‘Embodying a Perpetrator: Myths, Monsters and Magic’; for more on the gendering of violence, and the affective potential of stepping into such stories, please see Katarina H.S. Birkedal, ‘Closing Traps: Emotional Attachment, Intervention, and Juxtaposition in Cosplay and IR’, Journal of International Political Theory, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219830112.
[xii] In particular, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok does a great deal to address these concerns through a sensitive and deeply anti-colonial treatment of Asgard, and the introduction of a more diverse cast and take on the general Asgardian population. The 2021 TV series Loki is likewise significantly more diverse, and furthermore explores Loki’s queerness more openly. Taika Waititi, Thor: Ragnarok (Walt Disney Studios & Marvel Studios, 2017); Kate Herron, Loki (Disney+, 2021).
[xiii] Birkedal, ‘Closing Traps: Emotional Attachment, Intervention, and Juxtaposition in Cosplay and IR’.
[xiv] See inter alia Brit Solli, Seid: Myter, Sjamanisme Og Kjønn i Vikingenes Tid (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2002); Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, ‘(Un)Masking Gender – Gold Foil (Dis)Embodiments in Late Iron Age Scandinavia’, in Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, ed. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow (London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001), 179–99; Mark Pluciennik, ‘Bodies in/as Material Culture: Introduction’, in Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, ed. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow (London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001), 173–77; Anton Bierl, Ritual and Performativity: The Chorus of Old Comedy (London: Harvard University Press, 2009); Aoife Monks, The Actor in Costume (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Pravina Shukla, Costume: Performing Identities Through Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
[xv] Joan W Scott, ‘“Experience”’, in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), 22–40.
[xvi] See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997); Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82.
[xvii] See Saba Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36.
[xviii] See Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).
[xix] The martial politics of this game will be explored further in a future episode of the Visualising War podcast, where I will be talking to YouTube World of Warcraft commentators Taliesin and Evitel. In light of the recent lawsuit by the State of California against Activision Blizzard (producers of World of Warcraft) on charges of discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, I want to make clear the following: such behaviour is repulsive in the extreme, and the victims should be believed and supported.
[xx] For more on typical narratives of female perpetrators, see Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007); Caron E Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking About Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2015).
[xxii] See e.g. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Though I should say that Kaldor has since revised her thesis to embrace more nuance.
One summer, illustrator and book designer Jim Hutcheson was exploring the wares in a small bookshop in Spain when he came across an illustrated history of the life of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian knight also known as ‘El Cid’ or ‘El Campeador’. That got him thinking about the representation of other medieval warriors in literature, especially children’s books, and inspired him to commission artist Jill Calder and author James Robertson to create a new illustrated history of Robert the Bruce (published in 2014 by Birlinn).
Robert the Bruce is famous for many reasons, but particularly for leading the First War of Scottish Independence, so Jill, James and Jim quickly began wrestling with how to represent war and violence in art and text. The Visualising War podcast caught up with them recently and we had a fascinating discussion about the decisions they made and the impact which they hope their work will have.
The pivotal event in any account of Robert the Bruce’s life has to be the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), which resulted in an unexpected victory for the Scots over Edward II’s English forces. Jim, Jill and James dedicated 8 of the 64 pages in their book to narrating this, but they also wanted to take time over the events leading up to it, to help readers understand how that battle came about and how much violence had already preceded it on both sides. James talked particularly about the ‘Douglas Larder’ incident. Sir James Douglas was a Scottish landowner whose castle was occupied by English soldiers. On Palm Sunday in 1307 or 1308 (so the story goes), Douglas and his followers used a church service as cover to launch an attack on soldiers from the occupying garrison, killing many. He took surviving prisoners back to the castle and sat down with his men to enjoy the meal which had been prepared for the garrison on their return from church. Once full, he raided the castle stores and then gathered the remaining supplies in the cellars, where he proceeded to behead all the captives, piling their bodies on the stores and setting fire to them – as a grim warning to future occupying forces of what violence might befall them.
As well as giving readers a sense of just how violent the period leading up to Bannockburn was (English forces were acting with equal brutality towards any Scots they captured), James was keen to narrate this incident in a way that prompted comparisons with modern conflicts and atrocities, raising the question ‘Was this a war crime?’. Jill’s illustrations helped with this. As she explains on the podcast, she felt she could not shy away from the violence, even though the book they were creating was intended for younger readers. She did lots of research for her artwork, studying medieval sources to get details of clothing and weaponry right, for example, but also examining modern representations of conflict to inform her own. For the Douglas Larder story, she ended up basing her illustration on images of violence and retribution from local ‘wars’ between rival Mexican drug cartels. As she put it, this kind of theatrical violence – designed as a warning, as much as a punishment – is still going on in the world today; so, as well as giving her representation of 14th-century events a gritty realism, the echoes of modern atrocities in her artwork nudge readers to ask questions about the world we are currently living in and not just about Medieval ethics.
Jill Calder: Colour DPS illustration showing the gruesome outcome when Sir James Douglas (the Black Douglas) and his men seized Castle Douglas from the English, ate their fill of a huge banquet, plundered and then beheaded their captives, throwing them onto the huge fire they had built.
The picture Jills paints is colourful, beautiful even, with vibrant red flames flickering and a few stars visible through a castle window. The decapitated heads do not stand out – they are slightly hidden by the flames. But the beauty of those flames draws readers in, inviting them to look more closely; and once a reader notices the heads, they cannot unsee them. James, Jill and Jim all remember being shocked but fascinated by certain descriptions or images of violence in the books they read as children, and their hope with this page was built on that experience. Through a mix of compelling storytelling and gritty realism, they wanted to give their readers an image that would stick, that would fascinate, absorb and horrify, prompting them to peel away the layers and think: What? How? Why?
When narrating Bannockburn itself, James and Jill had four double-page spreads to work with, which allowed them to combine panoramic representations with close-ups of individuals. James wanted to stress that Robert the Bruce would probably not have opted to fight the battle, given the choice, and took time to set out the careful preparations they made to try to even out the huge imbalance between the much larger English forces and relatively few Scottish troops. He also wanted to focus attention on what Bruce said to his men before the battle, to remind readers why the conflict had been going on all that time and what was at stake for the soldiers themselves, about to risk their lives in what was likely to be a fight to the death.
Jill Calder: Battle of Bannockburn
One of Jill’s illustrations helps set the scene with a map of the battlefield, showing the troops gathered on both sides just before fighting began. Another zooms in on a decisive moment, when two warriors – Robert the Bruce and Henry de Bohun – charged towards each other and Bruce put an axe through de Bohun’s head. As with the Douglas Larder episode, there is no getting away from the violence of this scene. In the centre, a spray of blood shoots up as Bruce’s axe drives down through de Bohun’s helmet. Jill thought long and hard about how to capture the effort and determination which that extreme act of violence must have required, showing Bruce with teeth gritted and eyes focused as the horses carry their riders past each other. The horses themselves provide an extraordinary commentary on what one man is doing to another in this moment: their wide eyes help capture the adrenalin, terror and horror of the battlefield encounter. As with her other illustrations, Jill’s depiction of violence here is stylised as well as realistic, with vibrant colours and exquisite details drawing readers in, so that they look with a mixture of fascination and shock as they grasp what is unfolding. As simple as it is, this illustration captures some universal truths about battle and war, helping readers visualise not just the moment in question but the brutality of conflict at all times and in all places.
Jill Calder: de Bohun charges Bruce
During our chat, Jim, James and Jill reflected on the role that both fiction and history have to play in shaping our understanding of past and present conflict. The story of Robert the Bruce is a mix of myth and history, which makes it amenable to creative storytelling. Readers will discover things they did not know about Bruce and the Scottish Wars of Independence from James, Jill and Jim’s book; but they are also taken on a bigger learning journey because of the way in which the historical narrative can be retold with new emphases and used to prompt reflection on wider issues. In this illustrated history, we also see the way in which images of battle help add new layers to what a text can tell us, as well as vice versa. This book – aimed at children, but equally intriguing for adult readers – richly illustrates what sensitive representations of war can do: like some of the other children’s literature discussed in Part 1 of this blog, it makes people stop, think, recoil, worry and evaluate the rights and wrongs of what they have just read.
To find out more about representations of war in children’s books and James, Jill and Jim’s illustrated history of Robert the Bruce, you can listen to our interview on the Visualising War podcast.
The Visualising War podcast recently interviewed artist Jill Calder, author James Robertson and illustrator/book designer Jim Hutcheson, who is Creative Director at the Scottish publishing company Birlinn Books. They shared some fascinating insights into the representation of war, conflict and violence in children’s literature, based on the work they did together to create an illustrated history of Robert the Bruce, published in 2014.
We began by talking about the kinds of war stories which they had come across as children. While Jill was struck by the violence she encountered in some fairy tales, James and Jim remember enjoying comics like The Hotspur, The Eagle, Valiant and Commando War Stories in Pictures. All three mentioned the influence of films, particularly World War II films and Westerns; Zulu also got a special mention. For James, growing up in the 1960s and 70s, the Second World War still felt relatively recent – something which his parents’ generation had experienced first-hand – but he also recalls watching real-time footage of the Vietnam War alongside documentaries and dramas about more historic conflicts.
This got us thinking about the mix of fact and fiction which children are exposed to, and how fictional representations of war can enhance understanding of real or historic conflicts as well as vice versa. While James’ interest in the Wild West was sparked by comics and films, he followed it up by devouring history books on the subject. One of the books that made a huge impression on Jill as a child was Carve her Name with Pride, a dramatic retelling of the true story of agent Violette Szabo (later turned into a film), which widened Jill’s understanding of the different roles that women had played during WW2. Up to that point, Jill had only seen women playing a domestic role in representations of the Second World War.
We discussed the often unflinching representation of conflict in the encyclopaedias, history books, poetry collections and fairy tales which James, Jill and Jim grew up with. All three remember being both shocked and fascinated by particularly memorable images or descriptions of violence, from a black-and-white drawing of the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots to the description of the torture inflicted on Violetta Szabo in Carve her Name with Pride. Arguably, the stereotyping of villains and promotion of heroic ideals in the Commando comics (for example) tempered the impact of scenes of shooting, explosions and death, perhaps even desensitizing readers; but it was clear from what all three said that other representations of war and conflict had the power to make them stop and think, recoil, worry and evaluate the rights and wrongs of the story they had just come across.
While some representations of war made a big impression on them as children, others have shocked them more in retrospect. Although comic, tongue-in-cheek and clearly unreal, the brutal interactions between parents and siblings in William Cole’s Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls – brilliantly illustrated by Tomi Ungerer – are a useful reminder that our tolerance for different kinds of violence in storytelling changes over time. This got us thinking about what other changes we can trace in the representation of war and conflict in children’s books over the last few decades. We noted a widening of perspectives, moving away from a focus on adults, soldiers, models of heroism and fighting, to more exploration of the experiences of the wider population caught up in conflict, particularly families and children.
This is not a new phenomenon: two of the most compelling examples of a war story written from a child’s perspective are Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword (published in 1956) and Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (published in 1971); of course the Diary of Anne Frank has also been seminal in shaping how both children and adults understand aspects of World War II and the Holocaust. The Second World War seems to have lent itself particularly well to storytelling from a child’s perspective: other examples include Carrie’s War (by Nina Bawden), Rose Blanche (by Ian McEwen, based on the work of Roberto Innocenti), Goodnight Mr Tom (Michelle Magorian), Once (Morris Gleitzman), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (John Boyne)[i] and Number the Stars (Lois Lowry). While focused on experiences specific to their time and place (evacuation, the Blitz, Nazi occupation, and concentration camps), the young characters in these stories ask huge questions and make critiques of war that apply universally.
A related trend is the use of animals as a lens to look at war in children’s writing. Classic examples are Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982) and Robert Westall’s Blitzcat (1989) – followed more recently by Jenny Robertson’s Wojtek: War Hero Bear (2014) and Miriam Halahmy’s The Emergency Zoo (2016), among others. Animals can be a particularly useful hook for younger children, a way of narrating conflict in accessible, thought-provoking and empathetic ways. Set in the Syrian civil war, the picture book The Cat Man of Aleppo by Karim Shamsi-Basha (2020) brings a true story to life, helping young readers grasp the terrible impacts of war while following a character whose compassion and kindness offer hope. Nikolai Popov’s wonderful book Why? features a frog and a mouse who get into a confrontation, sparked by jealousy, which turns into a full-scale war and ends up involving many of their friends. The absurdity of the characters and their behaviour helps children ponder the causes of conflict as well as its tendency to escalate and devastating consequences.
In some children’s books, adults offer role models – as well as models to avoid. Like Popov’s Why?, David McKee’s picture book The Conquerors plays with the absurd, featuring a cartoonish general bent on war who is baffled by people who don’t want to fight. By contrast, Jane Cutler’s The Cello of Mr O focuses on an elderly musician, whose cello playing brings solace to a community ravaged by war. In Michael Foreman’s A Child’s Garden, the focus is more on how a child might nurture new life and sow seeds of hope, even in a landscape devasted by war; and there is also sense that older generations are looking to younger ones with hope and expectation in Sami and the Time of the Troubles by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland. That book captures how terrifying it is for a child to live in a war-torn city (in this case, Lebanon), but also how children find pockets of peace and ways to keep playing.[i]
Towards the end of our conversation, Jill, James and Jim discussed what future trends we might see as the children’s publishing world responds to new kinds of conflict, including drone warfare and cyber warfare. (You can find out what they said by listening to our podcast!) Whatever the future holds, it is clear that the war stories we come across as children profoundly shape our understanding of the nature, causes and consequences of conflict – and our responses to it. As Mandy Williams writes in this blog:
‘Images of violence and war are omnipresent. Fiction can help young people make sense of them. News images, fractured, decontextualized, leave a sense of hopelessness. A good plot, a context, the rhythm of a story unfolding can encourage exploration and questioning. Stories enable readers to identify with the protagonists, as real human beings with free will and self-determination, not as mere accidents of history. They transfer to the young reader a sense of their own agency.’
The question of what agency children are (or are not) given in representations of war in children’s literature is something which the Visualising War project plans to explore further. Many books place children at one end or another of the powerless/powerful spectrum, with some narratives characterising them as helpless victims in an adult world while others give (or load) them with the responsibility to rescue others or find life-saving solutions. Mandy Williams’ point, though, focuses on their agency not just as characters within a plot but as readers, interpreters, critics and questioners – and underlines the important role that children’s books and storytelling play in honing those skills.
As she notes, some people ask ‘Is war literature appropriate for children?’ Her answer? ‘Children love to play at being scared, and they like to hear readings of scary books. There is perhaps an evolutionary or psycho-protective drive to practice and to work through scenarios and emotions. As G.K.Chesterton told us, “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” ’
This gets to the heart of what the Visualising War project is interested in: we study how war stories work, but also what they do to us. Some narratives of war reinforce problematic ideologies which can be leveraged to justify violence or drive others to conflict. Many representations of war in the world of children’s publishing operate very differently, however, as more positive interventions in an ongoing conversation about why people fight, what war does to people, and how to resist it. In other words, it is not only appropriate for children’s authors and illustrators to tackle the difficult topic of war; it is also important, because it can empower children to combat or ward off conflict (one of the dragons in our midst) through empathy, understanding, an awareness of its horrors but also a realisation that it can be stopped, not just survived.
The narration of historic conflicts is just as effective in this as contemporary or futuristic representations, as I discuss in Part 2 of this blog, where we dive into Jill, James and Jill’s depiction of the Battle of Bannockburn and other aspects of 14th century war and violence…
How do we encounter and visualise World War I? It very much depends on who we are and in what country we live. Historian Jay Winter posits that World War I is the “forgotten war” in the United States. For the most part, history courses in high schools and universities examine the American Civil War, WWII, and the Vietnam War, but spend little time on the 20th century’s first global conflict, even as we continue to live with its outcomes in the 21st century.
We do meet WWI, however, through the arts and have done since the war ended. Film, in particular, most likely shapes our view of the war, and that view has been a very white, male, Eurocentric one. During the war’s centenary (2014-2018), several powerful films such as Journey’s End, War Horse, and 1917 took us to the Western Front as did Peter Jackson’s technically brilliant They Shall Not Grow Old, which used 100 hours of archival film footage, colorized it, and provided archival voiceovers from the war’s survivors. But whose voices, genders, experiences, race, and ethnicities were missing from the war’s history? How do we authentically represent this war, this global war, if these diverse voices are absent?
During the past decade, I have collaborated with artists from different disciplines – dance, theatre, and music – to create performance pieces that examine World War I through the lens of art. More specifically, to use men and women’s original writings from both sides of the conflict – letters, poetry, journals, memoirs, diaries, and novels – to form the centerpiece of each work. This use of original writings delivers an immediacy and rich authenticity in visualising the experience of the Great War.
In our earlier theatre work Messengers of a Bitter Truth, even thoughthe creative teams and the performers connected to the projects were a diverse representation, the text remained Eurocentric. With the opera version of Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War, however, we have been able to capture the greater truth of a global war and the urgency, hardship, and tragedy experienced by women across geographies and ethnicities.
Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War is a chamber opera that gives voice to women’s war experiences. Letters was originally conceived and performed as a short song cycle. When Brooklyn-based American Opera Project (AOP) offered Letters composer Kirsten Volness, my co-librettist Kate Holland and me the opportunity to expand the song cycle into an opera, we were delighted. Not only would we able to include more text set to Kirsten’s powerful and sensitive compositions, but even more importantly, we were able to create a more fully global work that included not only white European and American women, but also Black American, Caribbean, Indian, and African women’s responses to the war. That diversity was also reflected in the artistic team.
Unlike a traditional opera with named characters, Letters uses the words of real women to create archetypes that represent women’s war experiences from many countries on both sides of the conflict, diverse ethnicities and social classes, and quite different views on the war.
Our introduction to the libretto describes some of the archetypes that appear in the opera:
Mothers
One who embraces the war, even after her only child is missing for months and then reported killed.
“Violet passed on news from George: he said that up ’til now it had all been the most glorious fun.”
Another persuaded her husband to allow their youngest son to follow his older brother into the army and he was killed shortly thereafter. “Where are my children now? What is left to their mother?”
Daughters
Young women who volunteered as VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachments were nurses’ assistants) in theatres of war or ambulance drivers, “Dear family, The devastated country is much more strange and fantastic on a sunny day.”
OR a daughter trying to explain to her father even as she understands his support for the war, she sees its horrible reality daily as a nursing sister. “I understand too well how strongly you feel about the fate of our fatherland. Only our patients, in their awful agony, yearn for one thing, peace – “
OR in the case of one young Punjabi girl who was too young to do anything but worry about her father. “Dear Father, this is Kishan Devi. We were really scared after receiving your letter…”
Wives
Women at home, waiting for their husbands to return alive – whole (physically and mentally), or at least returning home as opposed to dying. Some knit “Shining pins that dart and lick” almost frantically; others knit resignedly, almost bitterly, “I sit and sew – a useless task it seems.”
A working class woman who views the war as one more way her life will be upended by forces beyond her control. “My husband’s in Salonika/I wonder if he’s dead.”
Lovers and Friends and Sisters
At the war’s beginning, expressing enthusiasm for a male friend’s volunteering, “The luck of there being such an adventure left in the world! And you there to have it – “
OR the young fiancée back home who has tired of waiting for her soldier to return, “My dear Jack, Everything must be over between us. Write back as soon as you can to say you forgive me Jack!”
OR women who lost their lovers, “When you lift up your eyes and cannot behold his face,/When your heart is far from him.”
Women of color
Women from Africa and India. Africa where men were taken into service by their imperial masters “At Karonga/People perished there, at Karonga./Why did they perish?”; India where women hoped the sacrifices made by Indian regiments would be rewarded by the end of the war by granting political self-determination. “Remember the blood of my martyred sons!”
Nurses
Women –experienced career nurses who if British nursed during the Boer War, or American nurses who came from US civilian hospitals. “If there is horror here you are not aware of it as horror. From the moment the doors close behind you, you are in another world…”
Younger volunteers who had no previous nursing experience. “When the end came, Finally, when the end – It took everyone’s breath away.”
Munition Workers
British working class young girls in their late teens and early 20s. Paid less than their male counterparts, but making more money than in any previous pre-war work.
Women who were quite simply cogs in the war machine whose health and welfare were never given a second thought. “Well I’d got this bad throat, you see, and the doctor, he said it was some kind of poisoning.”
Women who lost sisters who worked beside them in the factories, “…she died before she was 20…They reckoned the black powder it burnt the back of her throat away.”
Women Bearing Witness
Black American women who bore witness to the racist policies and ongoing discrimination that Black American soldiers and nurses faced throughout the war. “To represent the womanhood of our race in America – these fine mothers, wives, sisters and friends who gave the flower of their young manhood to the ravages of war.”
European women, many of them socialists and internationalists, who exhorted their sisters in the combatant nations to speak out against the war. “Women of Europe, when will your call ring out?”
The creative team who developed Letters feels strongly that visualising World War One through diverse women’s original writings helps to address the previously absent narratives of women’s war experiences. We are deeply grateful to the scholarship done in recent decades that has brought women’s writings into the war’s history where it rightfully belongs and where women’s voices can be expressed and heard – and honoured – through the arts.
To find out more about Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War, you can listen to our interview with Susan Werbe and Kirtsen Volness on the Visualising War podcast.You can hear some more excerpts of Letters here.
When I began my undergraduate degree here at the University of St Andrews in 2009, I did so with the wish to be absorbed into the words and worlds of others. I loved learning about other perspectives and fantasies through literature, and I enjoyed applying that understanding to new problems. Unexpectedly, it was International Relations (IR) that really sparked my imagination; I stuck with it for the next several years, leading first to a degree in IR, then a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, and finally to writing my PhD thesis within the field.
An Old Story, Katarina Birkedal
However, for all that IR presented me with a great array of stories – about how states act, about how power works on the international scene, and about how and why wars are waged – they were rarely discussed as such: as ‘stories’. I studied the power structures that facilitate conflict, the decision-making processes of leaders in times of crises – but not the stories that kept morale up among civilians, nor the songs soldiers hummed in the trenches. Of course, had I been a student in, e.g., the School of English or the Department of Film Studies, I would perhaps have encountered such narratives sooner – but at the expense of my knowledge of international political theory and martial politics. The study of war is multifarious, and different approaches naturally offer different perspectives: brought together, they form a complex and more complete picture of what war is. However, as long as war is studied through disciplinary siloes, those approaches remain limited.
At the core of each aspect of a conflict is its story, and I argue that this understanding is one way of bringing together different disciplinary perspectives. In fact, every discipline’s ways of studying war are themselves narratives of war. For example, the first such story IR told me was presented as a theory of the international, where war is an expression of the anarchic nature of international politics, where every state for its security must seek power at the expense of others. Consequently, war is a natural phenomenon, a paradoxical extension of humanity’s desire for safety. Though not presented as a story, if we study it as such we can uncover the tropes it perpetuates.
Through paying attention to the narratives of war – how war is told – we can come closer to understanding the ways in which our study of war does not simply reference or reflect but actively reproduces a politics of naturalised conflict experience. In other words, viewing the disparate studies of war as part and parcel of one self-referential story of war might also teach us to pick apart the tropes that sustain that story – and thereby also war itself.
I indicated in my first thought piece that ‘narrative’ can be understood in different ways: for example, it can be understood as an umbrella term inclusive of the many ways in which humans communicate with each other. In this sense, to focus on war narratives is to focus on the means by which experiences and expectations of war are relayed, whether as conventional stories or in inter alia photography, museum curations, charity events, or music.
As such it makes sense to view narratives as the form through which we understand and inform each other’s encounters with trauma and violence. In this there is something ageless; as Anke Walter suggests, in seeking to communicate what war is, authors, film-makers, journalists, peace campaigners, academics and others encounter many of the same challenges – and find many of the same solutions.[i] In this sense, ‘representations of wars – like the wars themselves – are often heavily intertextual (or interbellical).’[ii]
In an essay about remembering war, Stephanie McCarter compares the story of Aeneas with her grandfather’s experience as part of the Allied assault on Monte Cassino in World War II, writing that wars ‘have a devastating tendency to repeat themselves.’ Perhaps as a consequence of war’s incommunicability, we reach for the same narratives over and over again to try to share what happened, even when those stories really don’t reflect what happened; like this, we build what Kate McLoughlin calls a ‘bellicose canon’[iii] of what war is like.
Artistic representations, written stories, dramatic productions, and other means by which the events and consequences of war are creatively visualised, seek to embed in the audience a seed of that war. These narratives are designed to affect those who encounter them, to engender emotions and inspire action: to translate the unspeakable into something that we can begin to understand; into ‘a synaesthetic taste of the chaotic traumatic experience itself.’[iv] War is an ellipsis that those who experience it try, over and over again, to share the contents of – and through repeated attempts we now have a form through which war is processed.
In the Roman epic poem The Aeneid, Virgil ends the story of Nisus and Euryalus in Book IX with the invocation ‘si quid mea carmina possunt / nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo’ – ‘if there is any power in my poetry, the day will not come when your memory is erased.’Because of the power of stories to affect the reader so viscerally, these media are picked up and employed in order to produce the kind of impact that engenders lasting change. For example, IR scholar Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exileis written as a novel, with the result that the reader is uncertain whether the events detailed within occurred as written, or at all; instead, the book inspires a profound reflection on the notion of responsibility – and the difference between responsibility and guilt – in conflict.[v]
No less affective – and effective – was Hitler’s use of Shakespeare in his Stalingrad speech, imploring the German people to ‘think incessantly […] only on the fact that this war will decide “the to be or not to be” of our people.’ This speech is not only an example of intertextuality in practice, but also of the destructive power of such references: here is a ‘live or die’-moment, a narrative highlight around which you – the protagonist – must stop and take stock. Furthermore, Hitler, like many other speechmakers, refers back to previous conflicts – to Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, a winter ‘exactly 50% as cold as the winter we put behind us last year’; to Germany’s defeat in World War I as a people ‘confused and untrue to themselves’; and to the brutality of the British Empire, which ‘in 300 years [has] oppressed and yoked and subjected nation after nation’ – as cultural short-hands that trigger predictable emotional reactions in the audience.
I have used Hitler here as a particularly disturbing, affective example: referencing his propaganda brings to mind the atrocities of Nazi Germany. For many alive today (at least in the West), the narrative of World War II was our first encounter with war, and it has shaped all subsequent meetings. By studying such narratives we can begin to appreciate how these stories and narratives haunt our understanding of war. Our perception of what war is makeswar, in the way that all endeavours are derivative of what came before.
Every way we have of relaying what occurred in any given situation is, in a sense, a story told. For this reason, it is important to consider the ways in which we represent any aspect of war, because any such narration involves a responsibility taken for that event. What words and phrases are chosen, which cases are evaluated side-by-side, how the numbers are presented, and even the design of graphs; all of these become part of the narrative of any given war.
For example, should we compare the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to a civil war, or would this make us complicit in a political forgetfulness? In my previous thought piece, I mentioned the genocide in Guatemala, which was originally presented as legitimate state violence through a language of counter-insurgency.[vi] The presentation of facts of what happened – violence, massacre – is as liable to bias and tropes of storytelling as a story that is upfront about what it is.
With that in mind, it is important to study war narratives as a way of unpacking the preconceptions that recur and become self-sustaining in our understanding of what war is and does. The Visualising War project studies war narratives because of their ability to affect us so powerfully: not only in the moment, but in the sense that their legacy haunts us in all our encounters with war. In so doing, these war narratives form the conscious and unconscious blueprints for future war. The study of narratives of war is so important because in understanding their power, there is hope that we might in turn subvert the stories of other wars as they happen.
[i] Anke Walter, ‘“What It Felt like”: Memory and the Sensations of War in Vergil’s Aenid and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds’, in Krieg Der Sinne – Die Sinne Im Krieg. Kriegsdarstellungen Im Spannungsfeld Zwischen Antiker Und Moderner Kultur / War of the Senses – The Senses in War. Interactions and Tensions between Representations of War in Classical and Modern Culture, ed. Annemarie Ambühl (Thersites 4, 2016), 275.
[ii] Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Illiad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14.
[iv] Mark Thorne, ‘Speaking the Unspeakable: Engaging Nefas in Lucan and Rwanda 1994’, in Krieg Der Sinne – Die Sinne Im Krieg. Kriegsdarstellungen Im Spannungsfeld Zwischen Antiker Und Moderner Kultur / War of the Senses – The Senses in War. Interactions and Tensions between Representations of War in Classical and Modern Culture, ed. Annemarie Ambühl (Thersites 4, 2016), 79.
[v] Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (London: Routledge, 2013).
[vi] Roddy Brett, The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide: Political Violence in Guatemala (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
The Visualising War podcast recently interviewed Roman historian Dr Jon Coulston about representations of war on Trajan’s column, a huge victory monument erected in Rome in 113 AD to commemorate the emperor Trajan’s victory over the Dacians.[I]
As Jon explains in the podcast, Trajan reigned from 98-117 AD. In 101-2 and 105-6, he came into conflict with King Decebalus, whose kingdom – Dacia – bordered with the Roman empire across the river Danube. The column narrates the story of both Dacian campaigns, commemorating Decebalus’ defeat and Trajan’s victory through a sculptural frieze that winds all the way from bottom to top. The column was probably commissioned by the Senate of Rome, but it must have been influenced by the account the emperor himself wrote about his Dacian campaigns; and the designers and sculptors would have been keen both to please him and to meet wider societal expectations in their depiction of his military achievements. As Jon puts it in the chapter he has recently written for our Visualising War in Antiquity volume, Trajan’s column does not simply tell the tale of the Dacian Wars; it provides an index of how Roman victory and ‘barbarian’ defeat were defined, idealised and projected in Roman society.
In the podcast, Jon talks about the mix of historical realism and idealistic storytelling visible on the column. The sculptors were clearly briefed to depict contemporary Roman soldiers and Dacians, wearing clothing and carrying weapons that a Roman viewer would have recognised; and some of the scenes carved on the column narrate episodes in the campaigns or specific events that really happened. Some of the representation is more generic, however: there are stock scenes of fighting, fort building, motivational speeches and enemy submission that reflect shared ideals and long-established habits of visualising war more than reality. Some of the column’s depictions of battle are reminiscent of Classical Greek sculptural reliefs showing mythical battles between gods or giants, while other set-piece scenes were designed to evoke Roman military ideals such as discipline, organisation and technological skill.
Building camps and forts (Jon Coulston)
Trajan’s army advances to battle (Jon Coulston)
The column’s depictions of the Dacians supports its idealising of Roman military success. As Jon points out, there is a strong Roman momentum travelling all the way up the column, with Roman forces advancing inexorably towards the top as Dacians retreat. While Dacians are seen fighting back strongly in places, ‘their war-making abilities are basic… and their organisation is chaotic.’ Dacian mountains, forests and rivers are tamed by Roman forts and bridges, and the Dacians themselves are systematically overpowered. They die in great numbers, and those who survive are represented bound or humiliated. Decebalus’ leadership is contrasted, of course, with Trajan’s. The emperor is not depicted fighting himself but he makes regular appearances on the column as a commanding presence, with stock scenes underlining his virtues as a general.
Trajan addresses the army (Jon Coulston)
The death of Decebalus (Jon Coulston)
Trajan’s Column, Rome: first Roman advance across the Danube. Image courtesy of Jon Coulston.
In Jon’s words, the reliefs of Trajan’s Column were intended to assert Trajan’s achievements in war both through their attention to Roman and barbarian military realities and also by framing actions in intrinsically Roman terms, conforming to the expectations and interests of the Roman audience. The intricacy and volume of scenes on this huge monument are a staggering sculptural achievement, marking a high point never again equalled for contemporary detail and reportage in the Roman world. At the same time, the column presents Roman military activity in highly idealised forms, reflecting contemporary societal attitudes towards battle, generalship and military victory.
Jon reflects that the impact on the viewing public of the monument’s scale, lavishness and message must have been profound. The column formed a nodal point of public communication and imperial patronage at the geographical centre of Trajan’s Rome. Towards the end of the podcast, he also talks about the column’s influence on later triumphal monuments and wider habits of visualising war. Although its representations of war are very specific to the Roman context, it has ‘cast a tremendous shadow across military history ever since’. From the 2nd century AD through to Louis XIV and the American Civil War, it has not only shaped subsequent habits of representing victory; it has influenced the ways in which later military generals imagined themselves and even informed the ways in which some wars and battles were conducted.
As Jon explains in his chapter for our volume, ‘the sculpted reliefs of Trajan’s Column in Rome have been mined as a prime pictorial source for historical events, imperial display, concepts of war, victory and peace, Roman military ethos, architecture, tactics, ethnography, military organization, transport, and both Roman and barbarian dress and equipment.’ Crucially, it has much to teach us not only about the realia of Roman warfare but also about Roman habits of visualizing war and conquest. It stands as a valuable reminder that the relationship between narrative and reality is complex: narratives of war reflect reality up to a point, but they are influenced by a host of other factors, and their creative, evocative, idealistic representations of past campaigns have a habit of shaping later approaches, mindsets and behaviours in the real world.
If you want to find out more about Trajan’s column, you can listen to the podcast here. A version with captions and images will also be available on our youtube channel. More images and information can be found on Jon’s project website. We hope that this podcast episode inspires you to delve into other Roman representations of war[ii] and to keep thinking about their influence on modern habits of imagining and understanding military conflict.
The Visualising War podcast recently interviewed photojournalist Hugh Kinsella Cunningham about his experiences of capturing conflict on camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Based in the DRC for just over two years, Hugh has been documenting a range of humanitarian crises, from the impacts of Ebola to the mass displacements that have occurred as a result of the Ituri conflict in the northeast of the country. One thing that he tries to convey in his photography is the scale and complexity of these interconnected crises. As he explains, there are over 120 armed groups in the East of Congo; and Ituri province has seen over 1.6 million people displaced by fighting, with crimes against humanity being documented by the UN. In his own words, ‘Over 60 displacement camps dot the land, an entire community on the move, persecuted and frail. Stranded in these isolated safe havens, there is no end to the crisis in sight…’. His aim is to represent these crises in ways that make people stop, think, question and care. He wants the images he produces to raise awareness, engage people and inspire them to lobby for change.
Hugh talked about the some of the challenges of conflict photography and how it has changed in recent decades. During the Gulf War, debate raged over so-called ‘embedded journalists’: reporters accompanying (and often protected by) military forces, whose ‘unprecedented access’ to the front line was inevitably limited by what commanders wanted to direct attention to… or away from. As armed groups, state military and government bodies have become ever more digitally aware, they have exercised increasing control over what journalists see and what photographers can capture on camera. As Hugh explained, it is now rare for photojournalists to get access to front lines in the kinds of conflict that he covers; more often, journalists end up tracking the aftermath or wider ripples of increasingly invisible wars. Other factors exacerbate this trend. Conflict photography is an expensive business: journalists need security, HEFAT training, transport and other logistical support, but few media organisations are willing to fund this. Photojournalists like Hugh rely on grants from organisations like the Pulitzer Center and work for aid organisations to cover the costs of assignments. And yet as conflicts become less visible and access to them more closely managed by the powers that be, it is more important than ever that photojournalists are able to spend time on location, not just gathering memorable snapshots for media organisations to run on their front pages but documenting the wider complexities and impacts of conflict.
‘Veronique’ sits for a portrait at a camp for displaced persons, Ituri Province. This is one of 64 camps for communities fleeing violence. Massive displacement of populations as well as destruction, occupation and looting by armed forces has put the education, health and protection of thousands of children at risk. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham / Save the Children
Hugh talked about some of the trends in conflict photography that he consciously tries to avoid, in particular the production of horrifying images, which can retraumatise victims as well as switching viewers off. This echoes what another of our podcast guests, artist Diana Forster, said about drawing viewers in rather than repelling them with brutal pictures. Hugh recently teamed up with charity Save the Children to produce a series of portraits of children impacted by conflict in the DRC. Rather than parading children with terrible wounds or foregrounding victims of sexual abuse, as some journalists do, Hugh did not seek out particularly traumatic stories; he choose to capture a wide range of experiences (for example, a boy who briefly lost his mother in the chaos of an evacuation), and to represent his subjects not as victims but as children at rest or in contemplation, framed simply by their landscape. Using natural objects like flowers and leaves, he flooded the photographs with light and colour, infusing love, hope and a sense of protection. The patches of colour both draw viewers in and keep us at a discrete distance, preventing full exposure. They soften our approach to the children pictured as well as making us stop and wonder about their stories. This is both a sensitive and striking way of visualising conflict.
‘Rachel’ sits for a portrait at a camp for displaced persons, Ituri Province. This is one of 64 camps for communities fleeing violence. Massive displacement of populations as well as destruction, occupation and looting by armed forces has put the education, health and protection of thousands of children at risk. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham / Save the Children
Hugh sometimes captures more military images, but here too he strives for sensitivity as well as creativity. Again, the Congolese landscape comes into play, not just framing an individual soldier but giving viewers an atmospheric framework that helps us contextualise whatever military activity is being represented. Lush jungle, impressive cloud formations and serene mountain landscapes often contrast with the human activity in the picture, and the dialogue between landscape and human prompts us to look closer at individuals and consider their personal lives, struggles and motivations.
FARDC (Congolese Army) commando units patrol the jungles of the Semuliki Valley, Rwenzori Sector, Beni, North Kivu. The FARDC is heavily engaged with the islamist militants of the ADF, who have pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State terror group. Beni Territory is informally known as being home to the ‘Triangle of Death’, a the site of widespread killings by the group. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
Sometimes creativity comes from necessity. On patrol with an armed unit at night, Hugh became frustrated by how little he could see or capture on camera: so he decided to make a virtue of it. His series of photographs shot through night vision goggles plays with genre and audience expectations, adopting a form of representation that we sometimes see on live news reporting of dynamic conflict situations or at dramatic moments in action films. We are drawn to the images in part because we recognise them as a ‘high stakes’ kind of narrative, but also because we can’t quite work out what they show. We have to peer hard to see what is going on, and in that way Hugh captures the fact that so much of this conflict is invisible; it is hard to penetrate through the darkness, and what we see tends to be only a blurred fraction of what is going on. Necessity breeds creativity, and that in turn leads to impact.
Lieutenant Leandro Fernandez of a United Nations peacekeeping unit is seen through night vision goggles as his patrol interacts with families displaced by conflict on the outskirts of the town of Fataki, Djugu Territory, Ituri Province. Thousands of displaced persons have sought shelter in the town, church and IDP camps close to the perimeter. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
As we discussed on the podcast, Hugh’s work reminds us that there is no clear separation between art, society and politics: they impact each other. This is particularly clear in his coverage of the impacts of Ebola in communities already suffering through conflict. Here too, Hugh was interested in making the invisible more visible. Adding stained darkroom handprints to the photographs he took of health care workers and their military escorts, he wanted to capture the unseen transmission, traumas and mental health effects of the Ebola virus and the complexities of the dealing with a devastating epidemic in the context of ongoing violence and war. While some conflict photography focuses on armoured vehicles, ruined buildings and victims of violence, Hugh’s work paints a much broader picture, capturing the many ways in which war and other societal struggles and experiences overlap.
FARDC troops of the 3310th regiment prepare to set off on escort for the Ebola response operation of the day. Stained Hand Print, Butembo, DR Congo, 2019. Ebola Response work in the North Kivu outbreak is complicated by security issues with Mai-Mai and ADF rebels. Hugh Kinsella Cunningham
We learnt so much about habits of visualising war and the impact which creative and sensitive representations of conflict can have during our discussion with Hugh. You can see more of his powerful photography on his Instagram page and website. And if you want to find out more about his work, tune in to our podcast!
