Remembering the Falklands War

Media, Memory and Identity

Sarah Maltby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137556592
• eBook ISBN: 9781137556608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book offers an empirically informed understanding of how identity and agency become wholly embedded within practices of media-remembering. It draws upon data collected from the British military, the BBC and Falkland Islanders during the 30th Anniversary of the Falklands war to uniquely offer multiple perspectives on a single 'remembering' phenomenon. The study offers an analysis of the convergence, interconnectedness and interdependence of media and remembering, specifically the production, interpretation and negotiation of remembering in the media ecology. In so doing it not only examines the role of media in the formation and sustaining of collective memory but also the ways those who remember or are remembered in media texts become implicated in these processes. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Sarah MaltbyRemembering the Falklands WarPalgrave Macmillan Memory Studies10.1057/978-1-137-55660-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sarah Maltby¹

(1)

Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

End Abstract

The Falkland Islands are a unique site to investigate the complexities inherent in the intersection of war, media, memory and identity. This is because of the ways they have been continually imagined and historicised in and through media discourse; as a site of commemoration and memorialisation; as a site of contested political ownership; and as a site of UK nationalist politics. This was especially the case in the build up to and during the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War where all of these different—and at times conflicting—‘imaginings’ were implicitly evoked or explicitly represented in political and media rhetoric. As with all acts of commemoration, the past was recovered, re-told and remembered with particular consequences for those involved in the acts of (re)telling and remembering. Central to this was the subject of war, not only because of a commemorative focus on the conflict of 1982 but because of the ways the conflict was (re)appropriated for political and personal reasons. Whilst the political appropriation of a Falklands history was not unique to 2012, there were particular factors apparent during the 30th anniversary, relevant to the present and future of the Islands that (re)ignited the conflicting ‘imaginings’ described above.

The first was that, contrary to the convention of giving weight to substantive commemorative years (25th, 50th, 100th), the 30th anniversary was given significant importance in the media. Much of this was publicly attributed to the declining health and aging of living Falklands veterans (British and Argentinian) who might not be ‘fit enough’ to return to the Islands to commemorate and honour their compatriots in future years. ¹ Whether or not this was the case, the intense media focus on the memorialisation of all those who fought in 1982 intersected directly with other particularly potent claims and counter claims about the Islands (and the war) that were also heavily mediated. The second factor (related to the above) was Argentinian President Kirchner’s (re)evoking of the 1982 conflict through her renewed claims to the sovereignty of the Falklands that were framed within allegations of the British colonisation and militarisation of the Islands. In response, the British Government publicly declared emphatic public support for the Falkland Islanders’ right to self-determination (as laid out in the UN Charter) and in doing so also attempted to (re)stabilise wider diplomatic tensions within the South Atlantic. Despite this, media coverage of the 30th anniversary and the accompanying associations of loss and victory threatened to unsettle and challenge these diplomatic efforts as the memory of war was being used for political point scoring. ² Lastly, the Falkland Islands Government (FIG), in collaboration with the British Government, were making considerable efforts to promote the Islands as having undergone significant economic, political and cultural development since 1982 with particular emphasis on the economic self-sufficiency of the Islands, and the Islanders’ right to political self-determination (as laid out in the UN Charter). ³

Thus, although a distant war—temporally, geographically, politically—the struggles, contestations and traumas apparent in the 1982 Falklands (historical, political, institutional, social and private) were once more resonant in the present in media and political discourse, and for all involved. This book is about those struggles. It draws on ethnographic data collected from members of the British Military, the Falklands Islands Government, Falkland Islanders and the BBC in the build up to and during the 30th anniversary commemorative activities in order to explore how the differently ‘imagined’ Falkland Islands (as a site of commemoration, contested sovereignty and UK nationalist politics) and the tensions that lie between them were negotiated and rationalised in the public domain.

Ignited by the circumstances described above the research was initially guided by questions regarding the relative significance assigned to the 30th commemorative year by those involved (the British Government, British military, Falklands Islands Government, the Islanders and the media), and the extent to which this was underpinned by rationales of political and public diplomacy and/or a recognised need to memorialise the Falklands War for those who took part. To what degree, for instance, were the aspirations of the Falkland Islanders (and their government) to publicly promote the political, economic and cultural progressions of the Islands—an image that was increasingly necessary to establish credibility as a self-governing, self-determining nation—perceived as being undermined by the media’s evocations of historical diplomatic tensions and war victory. In short, how might the (re)emergence of the past, inherent in memorialisation narratives—both private and public—be diplomatically sensitive and/or overshadow the present Falklands in media analysis. And, if so, what might be the implications for political actors (including the British military), the media and the Islanders. What emerged from the data however, was a far more complex story about how remembering is enacted, performed and contested with the media, in the media and through the media, and how this becomes intrinsically linked to issues of identity, power and agency in the competition to privilege one’s own remembering (see also Sturken 1997); the implications of which extend far beyond the specificity of the Falkland Islands.

When I write of remembering with the media, I am referring to the content and form of remembering that results from encounters and negotiations with media products. How do media texts ignite a remembering—if at all, what type of remembering results and how does this resonate with broader influences that originate from media industries? Related to this, how do these relations inform a performance, projection or negotiation of remembering in the media, that is through the processes of engagement with media producers from which a public ‘remembering’ text is constructed? What does remembering in the media text reveal about what ‘remembering’ actor(s) (want to) remember and be remembered for? Lastly, the book explores how remembering is negotiated through media representations; that is, when one is the subject of media representation. Here I ask whose remembering comes to be represented in media, why and how? What are the implications for the subjects of these representations and for those denied a media presence? Where is the agency of those remembering located within these processes and how might it impact upon notions of individual and collective identity? Through the consideration of these three (not mutually exclusive) areas of media remembering—with, in and through—this book attempts to better ascertain where agency and power are located in a media remembering, specifically in relation to ceremony, commemoration and war.

Remembering

With the above in mind, let me now define the parameters of the book particularly with regard to the sticky area of terminology and definitions encountered by all those who engage in the scholarship of memory. There is an increasing body of work that examines the broad and variant subject of ‘memory’ in one way or another and yet it is by no means a settled field. Many continue to debate and contest fundamental aspects of its work including at the most basic level what constitutes ‘memory’, and the distinctions between individual and collective ‘memory’. As Winter (2006:185) has argued, people often refer to collective terms for memory (social, cultural, national) without reflecting on what they actually might mean. There is not scope to unpick these conceptual entanglements here, nor is it necessarily relevant to do so for the discussion contained herein. What is important, however, is to provide a definition of terms and ideas used throughout the book to alert the reader to how and why these definitions are employed and how they might relate to existing scholarly understandings of ‘memory’.

The first position from which this book draws is unsurprisingly that of Halbwach. A student of Durkheim, Halbwach’s work is the most cited starting point for any engagement in an understanding of the complexities and relationship between individual and (what is most often termed) collective memory. For Halbwachs (1992) individual memory is socially determined. It is the shared experiences of a social group, and their common reservoir of remembrance that forms a collective memory and that simultaneously informs individual, personal memories. This process is of course always in flux with the composition of the social group, the entry of new forms of information and the relative importance of particular types of remembering to the group over time. For Halbwach then, memory is always a reconstruction of the past that builds upon previous pasts, but always in relation to the social group. This is important to the forthcoming discussions primarily because the empirical case studies offered, whilst founded on individual interviews in some cases, offer insight into how a collective sense of the past and its relationship to the present is shaped by and shapes individual remembering. Hence, it is in the collective act of people engaging in the act of remembering together for a purpose—whatever that might be—that memories become formed. Should this activity cease, so too, eventually, does the memory. For the purposes of this book, it is the intersection of media in this process that becomes critical to how and why particular types of ‘memory’ become constituted and (re)constituted. Thus it is with Halbwach’s notion of the collective and social group that this book considers the powerful role of the media as integral to the processes of remembering in what others have termed the Halbwachian ‘leap’ from the personal and the concrete (how people remember) to the collective and metaphorical (how societies remember) (Neiger et al. 2011:12; see also Gedi and Elam 1996; Schwartz 1991).

At the same time, it is the point at which the media enters into this process that I take as a point of departure from Halbwach’s use of the term memory. Instead, I take up Winter’s (2006) notion of collective ‘remembrance’; that is, when groups of people come together in public to do the work of remembrance (see also Winter & Sivan 1999). For Winter, the study of collective remembrance enables us to understand what groups of people are trying to do when they act in public to conjure up the past (2006:5). This process implies agency, purpose and context and allows—for the purposes of this book—a consideration of what people are (collectively) doing when they act as a group to conjure up particular narratives and memories of the past for the media. Who is remembering, when, where and how, become critical to this investigation, as do the motivation and commitment of those engaged in remembering within a specific temporal and social context, in this case the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War. Individual memories are not dismissed here. On the contrary, the storying contained in the forthcoming chapters is based upon individual understandings and commitments to a particular construction of a past. But these individual memories (or rememberings) are located within a social phenomenon of remembrance that, as a consequence, directs our attention to a collective development and sharing of a sense of the past, and particularly to a past where there may be no direct experiential connection. This is important to understanding not only what is being remembered in, with and through the media, and by whom, but also who, how and why a particular social group want to be remembered.

At the core of all these processes are questions of power and identity; how might ‘remembering’ be informed by, or inform, notions of collective identity and allegiance, and how might a public performance of remembering in the media leverage power—or be conceived of as enabling the leverage of power—for those involved? Related to this last point, of course, is the important context of commemoration in which all of the ‘remembering’ discussed in this book can be located. It is through commemoration that people come together to perform remembrance and remembering, the result of which generates a particular representation and (re)vision of history as important to the present, and a present that has direct continuity with the past. The ritual of commemoration then reaffirms (and of course at times denies) a group’s shared connection to the past but in a manner that is also intrinsically bound up with issues of identity and power. At the same time, as Foot (2009) highlights, commemoration and commemorative ceremony is also fraught with division and contestation. Consequently, simple, consensual understandings of the past generated for commemorative purposes can actually expose divergent and contradictory narratives in both private and public. If, as Connerton (1989) suggests, commemoration is itself a type of performance through which narratives of the past are contested, and through which communities are reminded of their identities, then it is in the intersection of commemoration, collective remembrance and the media that we might most vividly locate the answers to some of the questions regarding how power and identity intersect with media remembering.

War is central to all of the above. As Portelli (1997:ix) contends ‘War keeps coming back in narratives and memories as the most dramatic point of encounter between the personal and public, between biography and history’. I reference Portelli here because his point is particularly relevant to the forthcoming chapters. For, whilst it was the subject of war that generated the start point of this research, it was in the ‘encounter’, oscillations and contradictions between the private and the public, between history and remembering and between narrative and (mediated) experience that the end point was formed. Questions about the authenticity of a mediated Falklands became secondary to issues of identity formation, power and authority in this regard. Thus whilst war is central to the forthcoming analyses, it is not—as Portelli might contend—simply because it forms the ‘dramatic point of encounter’, nor indeed because of the commemorative focus on war courtesy of the 30th anniversary. Rather, it is because the Falklands War was a mediated/mediatised war, with social, political, historical and cultural implications, that it could be (re)appropriated and for political and personal reasons; to make claims to agency, legitimacy and identity.

It is for this reason that, despite the original orientations of the research (as a site of mediated political diplomacy and contested imaginings), it was interpellation, memory work and identity management that, in the end, formed the central themes to emerge from the data and which the forthcoming empirical chapters explore in more detail. In this regard, this is a book of (and about) stories; specifically stories that remember. These stories are told in three distinct empirical chapters that draw on data from the British military, the BBC and the Falklands Islanders respectively. Their stories, and their storying, offer some insight into how each of these (groups of) actors make sense of the relationship between the past, present and future, how they negotiate their moral and political positioning through these understandings and how they attempt to generate (and express) a sense of collective identity in and through their media remembering as a result. But, their stories are also expressive of the dynamics and implications of particular power relations. Through the storying of their relationship to ‘a’ Falkland...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Media and the Falklands
• 3. Multiple Identities, Subjectivity and Narrative Sense-Giving
• 4. Identity and Memory Work as News Determinants
• 5. Conflicting Identities, Interpellation and Agency
• 6. Media-Remembering: Power, Identity and Agency
• Backmatter