New Directions in War and Culture Studies. An Early Career Special Issue

Abstract

This short article introduces this special issue which features the work of early career researchers and marks the retirement of the final founding member from the editorial team. It begins with a history of the Journal of War & Culture Studies and an analysis of its contribution to the field. It argues that JWCS has played a leading role in constituting and shaping this field by creating a forum in which scholars of the arts and humanities and social sciences have exchanged ideas and approaches by sharing their insights into particular conflicts or aspects of war. It also demonstrates how, as a result of this, we now have a more profound understanding of the extent to which experiences of war are embedded within a range of cultures and cultural practices. It concludes with an introduction to each of the essays in this issue.

Keywords:

• Journal of War & Culture Studies
• war
• culture
• arts
• humanities
• social sciences
• early career scholarship

The present issue marks my final substantial contribution to the Journal of War & Culture Studies as one of its team of editors, a position I have held since JWCS’ launch in 2007–2008. My own professional journey has been closely linked not only to that of this journal, but also to the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS) which preceded it. I gave my first conference paper as a PhD student at the second annual GWACs conference in 1996. Formed a year earlier, GWACS originally brought together scholars examining France's and the Francophone world's experience of conflict in the twentieth century. Imbued with the ethos and interdisciplinarity characteristic of Modern Languages more broadly, it immediately provided a welcoming environment for early career scholars like myself in which to test out ideas and to learn from other specialists of cultural history, literature, the visual arts and film, to mention but a few of the disciplines where the study of cultural representations of war had been quietly gaining ground. The forum provided by GWACS rapidly grew beyond its initial Francophone focus and as interest in the relationship between war and culture similarly expanded at the end of the twentieth century, so it became apparent that an annual conference alone could not fulfil GWACS’ mission.

In the early 2000s, therefore, the three members of GWACS’ executive committee (Debra Kelly, one of GWACS’ founding members, Nicola Cooper and myself) set about planning a journal that would serve to publish some of the research undertaken and delivered as papers at GWACS events thus far. The contents of the first issue were put together over lunch at Debra Kelly's house one late spring day in 2007 and published by Bristol-based academic publishers Intellect in 2008. The first few years of a journal's life are difficult. Much time can be spent attracting copy, but the work undertaken by GWACS ensured that there was a ready and steady supply of themed issues indicative of the exciting work being undertaken by scholars globally and of the new and emerging directions in war and culture studies. It rapidly became apparent that the journal was now more than fulfilling GWACS’ original function. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the study of cultural representations of war was no longer located in the academic margins; it was now a major component in research being undertaken in disciplines ranging from history to media studies.

Early themed issues of JWCS reflected this diversity and the mainstreaming of war and culture studies within the arts and humanities. These included explorations of particular conflicts (the First World War and Spanish Civil War), responses to conflicts in literature and the visual arts, and the representation of a range of actors in conflict, from soldiers to nurses. However, it became rapidly apparent that the journal's Eurocentric approach (designed primarily as a means of managing the three editors’ workload) meant that exciting scholarship from other disciplines was being left out. In 2013, and following year-on-year growth in subscriptions, JWCS was sold to Leeds-based publishers, Maney, which was subsequently acquired by the journal's current publishers Taylor and Francis. This then provided the editors with an opportunity to expand the journal's content and remit, growing from three issues to four annually, and allowing for a global focus on the relationship between war and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. (This also led to a significant increase in subscriptions.)

Increasingly, this broadening of JWCS’ horizons was reflected in its themes that now explored colonial and post-colonial legacies of conflict as well as war's transnational dimension. At the same time, JWCS’ understanding of what constituted war began to expand, moving beyond its dominant focus on the major international conflicts of the twentieth century to include a broader range of conflict types. As a consequence, the journal drew the attention of scholars in the social sciences working with the cultural artefacts of war. In the last 10 years especially, JWCS has become a space in which scholarship from the arts and humanities enters into dialogue with scholarship from the social sciences. Issues and articles have as a consequence diversified even further, both in terms of themes and approaches. In one year, readers might encounter an issue exploring the impact of the Napoleonic Wars upon theatre and opera and another devoted to remote or drone warfare. Moreover, geographic coverage is now truly global, stretching from South America to Australasia via Africa and South East Asia.

In the first article of the first issue of JWCS, and paraphrasing Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong's 1970 Tamla Motown classic (sung by Edwin Starr), Debra Kelly (2008) asked what, if anything, war is good for. Drawing upon Elaine Scarry's (1985) assertion that war is the suspension of civilization, the ‘unmaking’ of the world through the destruction of another's life and their world, Kelly nevertheless argued that war has unleashed a world of creation that:

seeks, if not to reverse, then to give imaginative form to the act and effects of war, its consequences and its aftermath, thereby ensuring that the human remains visible, that form is given to an experience ‘objectified in language and material objects’ (Scarry 1985: 255), that is to say, in cultural artefacts that are the marks, traces, and legacy of human experience. (Kelly 2008: 7).

JWCS, through its continuous study of these artefacts and the cultural echoes of conflict, has not only enriched our understanding of these; it has contributed to a far more profound understanding of the extent to which experiences of war are embedded within a range of cultures and cultural practices.

These days, my own research is less centred on the study of war and culture, but I know full well that it will never escape the gravitational pull of the field. Nor do I want it to, because it continues to fascinate me and it is where my own research journey began. It therefore feels appropriate to bow out of my involvement with JWCS by devoting the final issue I will edit to those just starting their careers in the field. Born out of an online workshop exploring new directions in war and culture studies, this issue contains six articles written by early career researchers (those who are completing or have recently completed their doctoral research).

Our first article, ‘The Argonauts of the Western Front: Poets as Ethnographers of the culture de guerre’ by Julia Ribeiro Thomaz, offers a study on French poetry of the First World War. Analysing a large corpus of often neglected works, Thomaz argues that poetry as a wartime practice is of both literary and ethnographic interest since war poets adopt certain ethnographic conventions. Therefore, the study of First World War poetry facilitates a dialogue between literary and historical scholars. Thomaz's article thus reflects several key principles of JWCS: the attention to margins and traces of cultural production often neglected by mainstream research and its interest in the cannon, but also the principle of interdisciplinary dialogue.

In partial recognition of GWACS’ origins in French Studies, the second article also focuses (at least in part) on France. Gwendoline Cicottini's ‘A Dangerous Game: The Forbidden Relationships between French Prisoners of War and German Women During World War II’ uses testimony, memoirs and legal records to examine and evaluate the challenge that German women who had sexual relations with French forced labourers and POWs represented for the Nazi authorities. Cicottini thus exposes the gap between totalitarian ideology and prescribed behaviours, on the one hand, and social reality as it is reflected in the cultural traces of the French presence in wartime Germany. Her article thus also offers fresh insights into the experience of French POWs, highlighting their relative agency compared to other POWs at this time. It also introduces a new approach to the journal through its focus on the history of law.

From the Second World War, we move to more recent conflicts involving the British army in Hannah West's ‘A Negotiated Gender Order: British Army Control of Servicewomen in “Front Line” Counterinsurgency, 1948-2014’. JWCS has featured several articles and themed issues on women and war since its launch, but West's treads fresh ground by considering women's war labour in front-line combat roles in Malaya, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan across a 70-year period. Deploying critical feminist theory, the article reveals what West terms ‘a complex negotiated gender order’ between the British Army and servicewomen. This controls and co-opts the latter whilst allowing a degree of agency which nonetheless does not fundamentally threaten the army's gender hierarchy. Drawing upon testimony and memoirs, West's article reflects the productive dialogue between methods derived from the practices of both historians and social scientists.

Georgia Vesma's ‘Before Babylift: Female Photojournalists and Vietnamese-American “Orphans” in American Print-media, 1971-1973’ then takes us across the Atlantic to the USA and the impact there of the Vietnam War. Here she examines how the adoption of Vietnamese ‘orphans’ was promoted in the US press while foregrounding the role of women photo journalists in this process. Frequently marginalized or neglected during the conflict itself, these played a leading role in promoting ‘transnational adoption’. Vesma's article thus considers more broadly how photographs create discourses of ‘rescue’ and ‘responsibility’ in humanitarian and especially wartime contexts.

In ‘Returning Home After War: Representations of Romanian Veterans in a Contemporary War Novel (Schije/Shrapnel)’, Sorana Jude explores the theme of military homecoming in Ioana Baetica Morpurgo's novel set during the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan. Here Jude demonstrates how fiction concerned with war can often teach the reader much about the broader experience of conflicts. As a study of veterancy, but also of life in post-socialist Romania, Shrapnel traces the evolving nature of military–civil relations in a country that is negotiating its way between post-socialism, militarism and neo-liberalism whilst ultimately suggesting (in contradistinction to many Western European and US narratives) the restorative function that home and homecoming can play for veterans.

The issue concludes by bringing us up to the present via the study of a relatively new medium with Aleksandra Jaworowicz-Zimny's ‘“Entangled in War Stories”: Affect and Representations of War Narratives in Fanvids’. Reflecting culture's constant ability to give new forms of expression to the experience of war, this article explores a recent phenomenon: videos created by individuals who reuse third-party audio-visual resources in order to reflect upon and remember particular conflicts. Drawing upon ethnography, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and focusing particularly on the current conflict in Ukraine, Jaworowicz-Zimny considers the mechanisms through which these fanvids seek to generate an affective response in viewers.

It is perhaps worth noting, and indeed fitting, that all the contributors to this special issue tracing new directions in the field of war and culture studies are women as well as early career researchers. GWACS was originally launched by a group of female academics at the University of Westminster. Moreover, their sex was apparently unfavourably commented upon at the time by some military historians. Not only was GWACS distracting scholars from the serious study of war by focusing on culture, it was led by women who were now ‘“messing about with war”’ (Kelly 2016: 205). That disruption of the ways in which we study war is directly responsible for opening the way to the study of a greater range of voices and experiences of war. This volume reflects the ongoing and promising work being undertaken by a new generation of scholars who together are ensuring that war and culture studies will remain a prominent feature of the academic landscape.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Hurcombe

Martin Hurcombe is Professor of French Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a specialist in early twentieth-century French culture, history, and politics and is the author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (Rodopi, 2004) and France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War next Door, 1936–45 (Ashgate, 2011). His most recent book, co-written with Martyn Cornick and Angela Kershaw, is French Political Travel Writing in the Inter-War Years: Radical Departures (Routledge, 2017). His current work explores the history of the French sports press and publication industry through its relationship to road cycling.