News

On Saturday the 20th of May, we brought together at the University of Warwick an international group of scholars working on various themes relating to themes of post-war return. The desired outcome was to initiate a discussion between scholars across disciplines, geographies, and periods, thinking about the subjective dimensions of homecoming. This is significant as this field has long been dominated by normative and prescriptive social science analysis. We were particularly interested how literary theory and criticism might fertilise detailed historical analysis, and specific examples from the past might enrich and nuance broader theorisation.

Our keynote speaker Kate McLaughlin from the University of Oxford got us going with a fascinating, challenging and provocative talk on the ‘silent’ veteran, using the particular example of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Her remarkable interweaving of philosophical theory, in particular drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, and close literary analysis, was remarkably applicable to historical analysis. Through the speech she made the figure of the ‘silent veteran’, a problematic in all our studies, a fruitful field of analysis. The importance of ‘listening’ to the silences was particularly resonant and significant to all the presenter’s studies.

The first session ‘What home? Disrupted Homecomings’ spoke very closely to some of the key themes of the conference. All three papers stressed different dimensions of the problematic of ‘home’: what constitutes home in the post-war, across time and place, and for different individuals. Professor Taylor Soja’s discussion of a British officer, dragged backward and forward across the Empire in the ‘Small Wars’ of the late-Victorian era, complicated how ‘home’ for many could be the Front itself, but also how this would change over one’s life. On the other side of the colonial divide, Rose Miyonga gave an account of the inability of many Kenyan men and women to come home, even 60 years after the Mau Mau conflict. Due to close ancestral ties to their land, which was taken by the colonial government, people continue to feel discombobulated so long afterwards. War however can also provide a tool for making one’s idea of home much more secure, as Amy Carney elucidated. In studying a German-born Jewish soldier in the American Army, she revealed that the war itself crystallised his identity as an American, which became, undisputedly, home.

Our next panel considered how women specifically experienced, and are represented in accounts of, post-war homecoming. Alison Fell gave a remarkable account of what place combatant women came to have in post-war memory and myth-making. Due to women’s personification as the nation, tied closely to traditional ideas of motherhood, the image of homecoming was the putting down of the rifle, used to protect the home, and the taking up once again of mothering roles. In a different register, Marcin Filipowicz analysed contemporary Czech literature to illustrate how women’s homecomings disrupt easy theorisations of good and evil in post-war contexts. His powerful rendition of a scene of violent homecoming of a female holocaust survivor, with real bearing on how we consider post-war homecoming, precisely indicated the value of an interdisciplinary approach to this subject.

The third and largest panel of the day considered the broad question of the politics of homecoming, and especially how veterans made claims on the state. Robin Bates introduced to the conference a theme which would come up repeatedly, the battle for veteran’s rights, in his case, Union veterans of the American Civil War. His conception of the struggle for veteran’s rights contrasted the very different idea of the veteran in contemporary Russia. Elena Racheva shared how since the fall of the Soviet Union the state has weaponised veterans for their own ends, slowly incorporating the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan as part of a glorious struggle in the defence of Russia. The instrumentalisation of veteran’s status was similarly demonstrated in Drew Flanagan’s discussion of French far-right activist François de la Rocque, who used his status of front-line soldier to resist allegations of collaboration. The final speaker of the panel, Susan Carruthers, spoke to a very different way post-war homecoming was framed by the state - through the British offering of ‘demob’ suits to returning servicemen. Hereby they were to be re-civilianised, although multiple groups (i.e women) were excluded.

Ably chaired by Holly Furneaux, our fourth panel brought the focus specifically on disability-centric histories of Homecoming. Nick Bailey spoke to a specific institution that mediated disabled homecomings, the British Corps of Commissionaires, with strong disciplinary overtones. This genealogy of veteran’s rights was continued by Michael Robinson, who discussed debates about provisions for veterans across Canada, Britain and Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, with a special focus on ‘invisible disabilities’. The different treatment in different countries was also reflected in Sofya Anisimova’s excellent reflection on disabled Imperial Russian officer veterans. Here too was remarkable picture of fluctuation over time, and the political uses of disability by the veterans themselves.

The final panel tied together many of the themes of the conference, discussing how veterans produce narratives that reflect on their homecoming. Chloe Storer spoke on reticence in her own oral histories with British Afghan veterans, linking back to the notions of silence considered in the keynote speech. Eamonn O’Keeffe spoke by contrast on a very talkative veteran, Shadrick Byfield, who leveraged his literacy and experiences with members of the elite to survive in Victorian Britain. The final speaker of our conference Dimo Georgiev showed how the staid, jargonistic, novels of Bulgarian International Brigadiers became standard reading in socialist Bulgaria, omitting the difficult realities of homecoming.

Altogether, the conference met the objectives we set wholeheartedly. This panoply of scholars has a real contribution to make to the study of the post-war, and to that end we seek to keep the momentum going with an edited collection. Such an opportunity is available with Routledge’s Warwick Series in the Humanities, which we hope to take advantage of in the coming months.