Memory and the Wars on Terror

Australian and British Perspectives

Jessica Gildersleeve, Richard Gehrmann, Jessica Gildersleeve, Richard Gehrmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319569765
• Print ISBN:
  9783319569758
• Subtopic: Historiography

This edited collection aims to respond to dominant perspectives on twenty-first-century war by exploring how the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Wars on Terror are represented and remembered outside of the US framework. Existing critical coverage ignores the meaning of these events for people, nations and cultures apparently peripheral to them but which have - as shown in this collection - been extraordinarily affected by the social, political and cultural changes these wars have wrought. Adopting a literary and cultural history approach, the book asks how these events resonate and continue to show effects in the rest of the world, with a particular focus on Australia and Britain. It argues that such reflections on the impact of the Wars on Terror help us to understand what global conflict means in a contemporary context, as well as what its representative motifs might tell us about how nations like Australia and Britain perceive and construct their remembered identities on the world stage in the twenty-first century. In its close examination of films, novels, memoir, visual artworks, media, and minority communities in the years since 2001, this collection looks at the global impacts of these events, and the ways they have shaped, and continue to shape, Britain and Australia's relation to the rest of the world.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• Chapter 1 Memory and the Wars on Terror
• Chapter 2 False Memories and Professional Culture: The Australian Defence Force, the Government and the Media at War in Afghanistan
• Chapter 3 The Limitations of Memory and the Language of the War on Terror in Australia, 2001–2003
• Chapter 4 Enemies of the State(S): Cultural Memory, Cinema, and the Iraq War
• Chapter 5 Remembering the Warriors: Cultural Memory, the Female Hero, and the ‘Logistics of Perception’ in Zero Dark Thirty
• Chapter 6 Remembering the First World War After 9/11: Pat Barker’s Life Class and Toby’s Room
• Chapter 7 Novel Wars: David Malouf and the Invention of the Iliad
• Chapter 8 In Extremis: Apocalyptic Imaginings in Janette Turner Hospital’s Post-9/11 Novels
• Chapter 9 ‘Shock and Awe’: The Memory of Trauma in Post-9/11 Artworks
• Chapter 10 Bearing Witness to Injustice: Latin America, Refugees, and Memorialisation in Australia
• Chapter 11 A Sense of Embattlement: Australian Jewish Community Leadership’s Response to 9/11
• Chapter 12 Violent Femmes: Collective Memory After 9/11 and Women on the Front Line of Journalism
• Chapter 13 Death and the Maiden: Memorialisation, Scandal, and the Gendered Mediation of Australian Soldiers
• Chapter 14 Reflecting on the Wars on Terror
• Index