Curating and re-curating the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Wednesday 3 Mar 2021, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/London

This roundtable discusses 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 institutionalise narratives of national identity, armed violence, and international power. It asks whose perspectives are available at these sites of memory, and whose war experiences are minimised 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 aesthetics to both honour the author's contribution to the field and discuss how it re-energises reflections on collective memory, armed conflict, and militarism.