Description
This roundtable will be a discussion of Christine Sylvester's most recent book, Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (2019, Oxford University Press). The monograph explores how war memorials and museums, military cemeteries, and war novels and memoirs institutionalize narratives of national identity, as well as international power. It asks whose vantage points on war are made available at these sites of memory, and whose war experiences are minimized or ignored in ways that advantage contemporary militarism. Following one reviewer (J. Auchter),the book pushes the boundaries of war studies and is 'a masterful example of how narrative work can generate knowledge'. This roundtable will bring together scholars of war, militarism, and resistance to both honour the author's contribution to the field and discuss how the book re-energizes reflections on the role of sites of memory in normalizing and destabilizing of liberal militarism.
