Displaying marginalised and ‘hidden’ histories at the Imperial War Museum London: The Second World War gallery regeneration project

Abstract

Using Imperial War Museums’ redeveloped Second World War Galleries as a case study, this provocation discusses the ways in which refocussing outmoded British narratives to a transnational viewpoint and using the interpretive framework of ‘total war’ can help us to deliver new, authoritative and multifaceted narratives where ‘hidden’ histories can be displayed, and scrutinised, in plain sight.

Keywords:

• Second World War
• total war
• China
• museums
• exhibitions
• material culture

In 2021, the Imperial War Museums (IWM) will open new permanent Second World War Galleries at its main London branch on Lambeth Road. The narrative for these galleries has been developed with the overall intention of repositioning IWM’s traditional remit of Britain and the Empire within a broader, global context. The Second World War narrative, as reflected in IWM’s galleries of the 1990s, drew out events that lay ‘closest to home’ for Britain and the Commonwealth, so the footprint given over to showcases relating to the individual case studies of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain was about the same as the total and entire campaign in the Pacific or the war on the Eastern Front. Visitors would have fairly concluded that within the strategic balance of the war, these events carried the same weight, or affected a comparable number of lives. The narrative emphasis on the British experience had dominated historical collecting as well as display, since no official collecting policy was established following the war, creating an imbalance in the cultural material and memory held by IWM.

This was particularly pertinent in IWM’s historical explanation of events in China. Hit by a Japanese invasion that steadily forced its way around the rim of the Pacific, China was engulfed in a confrontation that saw both civilians and military personnel engaged in battle and millions die. Subsequently overshadowed in the minds of many British people by the nation’s humiliating struggle for imperial survival in Malaya, Burma and along the borders of India, or dominated by the still culturally and politically powerful experience of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) and internees, the wider events of the world war in Asia were invariably occluded or forgotten. One senior curator recalled how in the 1990s IWM reinforced this presentation of a parochially British image of the war, when the Director General at the time – Robert Crawford – refused to let IWM lease a Japanese-made car for internal travel purposes, due to fear of criticism from the FEPOW Association and bad publicity from the British press.

To address the narrative imbalance that dominated the Second World War Galleries of the 1990s, IWM’s new galleries will have a much larger footprint for areas relating to the war against Japan in Asia and around the Pacific. The aim is to broaden the focus to include the millions of people from all sides who were embroiled in the conflict in these regions. This will allow for understanding of the experiences of a wider range of people, both British and international, and may consequently engage non-British and international visitors who have historically felt excluded from the singular interpretation of the British experience in war.

This change is also likely to be quite challenging for some of IWM’s core audiences, familiar with the traditional and well-rehearsed narratives present in IWM galleries to date. They may criticise the reduction in space and content dedicated to a type of history reflective of familiar stories told by their parents and grandparents, stories that feature regularly on documentaries or film, or have been taught in schools. There may be a disconnect between the knowledge people have obtained through these means and IWM’s new, more complex retelling of the stories of the Second World War, and between a didactic historical form of retelling, and a new museological approach which embraces open-ended dialogue within the gallery spaces, asks visitors questions, and includes diverse voices. There may also be those that believe that as a large national museum, IWM should maintain an overall focus on Britain and the Empire’s involvement in the war. As IWM strives for relevance in the twenty-first century, against a backdrop of public distrust in mainstream media-outlets and in a constrained economic environment, the narratives chosen by curators must be relevant to audiences who have demanded a focus on global citizenship, want to see links between the past and the contemporary international community, and who look to see themselves reflected in the diverse people, stories and experiences included in IWM galleries.

Allocating more space within the galleries to the war in Asia will only be successful in bringing prominence to marginalised histories if the space is visually and sensorially stimulating. Pairing strong exhibition storytelling with design, interactivity and audience engagement will allow the content to resound and find presence within the gallery as a whole. There are a limited number of objects attributed to China’s war against Japanese aggression within IWM’s collection, because IWM has not historically prioritised collecting material from countries where Britain did not have direct involvement. The items that IWM does hold are mainly two dimensional: official photographs taken by American and British visitors to China, and a few Japanese propaganda leaflets directed at Chinese civilians. This material does not reflect the experiences of Chinese civilians as told from their own point of view, but only as subjects of another country’s observation, coloured by particular collecting biases and other modes of historical prejudice. In order to uncover the impact of war on Chinese people, but without the resources to embark on a collecting project in China, the curatorial team at IWM reached out to Chinese museums to discuss the possibility of loaning objects to display. Most were enthusiastic about IWM’s attempt to locate China’s involvement in the global story of the Second World War as part of the way it would be presented in a British national museum. Following discussions with the equivalent Chinese curatorial teams, IWM was offered a range of objects on loan including a suitcase that once contained the treasured personal belongings of a civilian who sheltered from air raids in Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, to a bugle, lantern, and uniform used by the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army, and a driver’s licence obtained by a Chinese soldier training under the Allies in India. The object-loan negotiations were challenging because of practicalities around securing permission to move objects from their country of origin. When negotiations stalled, the museum attempted to purchase objects from private dealers in China including the uniform and equipment of a Chinese National Revolutionary Army officer. The Nationalist regime fell to the Communists in 1949, and so the objects and the stories related to the wartime experiences and contributions of Nationalist forces were not recognised and became marginalised or hidden from history. Although a new political openness within China has allowed for these objects and stories to resurface, complexities arose in researching provenance for objects, or navigating archival material that had not been digitised and was catalogued in Chinese. These were compounded by differences between international curatorial collecting methodologies.

One such methodology, central to the redevelopment of IWM’s Second World War Galleries, is the deference to contemporaneity in object selection and interpretation. All of the objects chosen for display in the new galleries were made, used, or written during the war years and can therefore be interpreted for their significance at the time. This allows IWM to present the war as it was seen and understood as it happened, without historical hindsight or tendency towards teleological inevitability. This is not a universally used interpretation method but was employed successfully in IWM’s First World War Galleries, which opened in 2014. Identifying objects that fit these parameters added to the complexities of borrowing material internationally.

Objects acquired and displayed can be used to illuminate histories that have previously been marginalised on an individual level and within themes that run through the whole interpretation structure. The narrative of the new galleries will be woven around the defining theme of ‘total war’, a well-versed narrative spine but one which also needs unpacking, and which characterised an enormous sequence of events from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, to the Soviet Union’s successful testing of its first atomic weapon in 1949. IWM’s vision of total war is one in which all the resources of a society, including its members, are mobilised, and affected by war. Curators alighted at total war as a starting point because it can include the causes and effects of separation, evacuation, mobilisation, hunger and famine, sexual violence, and the bombing of civilians as well as the more widely recognised military consequences, all of which demarcate the remit of IWM as opposed to, say, the remit of the military museum sector.

Case studies and objects will be used to interpret the gallery-wide total war theme and highlight patterns of historical events and the transnational links between them. For example, the majority of visitors to IWM will be familiar with the Blitz – the aerial bombing campaign against civilians during the attacks on Britain in 1940 and 1941. IWM holds a large amount of material culture which records experiences of the Blitz, including uniform and equipment used by the civil defence services, personal diaries and letters describing reactions to the raids, and propaganda leaflets and posters advising on the building of shelters. These recognisable – even mundane – objects have the capacity to invoke memory, carry embodied meaning and encourage intergenerational discussions between visitors: audience participation is vital in the process of making meaning and sharing knowledge. In order to encourage that same level of engagement within a new global narrative structure, IWM will use the theme of total war to bridge and explore the experience of aerial attacks elsewhere. Between February 1938 and August 1943, Japanese aircraft conducted raids against Chongqing, transforming ordinary Chinese civilians resident in the city into front-line combatants. Air raid warning systems were put in place and public bomb shelters were built. Under the theme of total war, the display at IWM of Chinese air raid shelter admission tickets, arm bands belonging to air raid wardens, and images of people and places affected by bombing in Chongqing will place a marginalised aspect of the Second World War in a prominent public space in Britain deliberately to establish parallels with the better known British experience.

Creating international links in the narrative through the recognition of total war is not intended as a way of suggesting that all countries and cultures experienced war in the same way. Instead it is a way to build effective connections and moments of identification across international boundaries. It could also inspire historical empathy. But crucially, it will highlight individual differences, acknowledging that although we share the history and material culture of the Second World War, experiences of it were diverse. The new narrative will include over 100 personal stories that show the impact of war on the individual. These stories include pain, suffering, and loss in the face of war, but also demonstrate empowerment, liberation, resilience, and resistance. They will provide an opportunity for visitors to see themselves in the galleries, through diversity of heritage, background, social standing, age, gender, belief, emotion, work, and personality. Finding moments within the narrative for identification on a personal level has long been an important interpretive tool at IWM. For visitors, establishing connections with the past enables a deeper understanding of the complexities of life during conflict in the contemporary. For this reason, varied and diverse personal experiences of the bombing in both Britain and China will be picked out alongside the material object-based displays, as well as experiences of bombing in other countries, such as Germany and Japan.

As museums strive to become agents of memory and change through the surfacing of marginalised and hidden histories, they need to integrate and challenge established narratives, pose questions, and inspire a deeper understanding of history. By placing British experiences of the Second World War into a wider global context, IWM hopes to challenge outmoded structures of partial storytelling and rehydrate hidden histories for larger and more diverse audiences. Although taking a substantially more balanced and global approach to the narrative and physical pacing of the gallery, IWM is aware that it will not be able to include many of the underrepresented or marginalised histories that would need to be addressed for a ‘full’ telling of the experiences of the Second World War. But, by highlighting global patterns and themes across the conflict, particularly through the interpretive framework of total war, and by including more diverse individual experiences, IWM will provide visitors with an accessible platform to engage with aspects of history that might have previously been hidden, marginalised, or unknown to them. As a national museum, IWM’s galleries need to be relevant to twenty-first century visitors who are part of a progressive international community. Its narrative, the objects it displays, and the personal stories it tells need to be more diverse and more global – simply put, IWM’s audiences demand it. The new Second World War Galleries will be a permanent fixture at IWM for the next two decades and, by adopting a more transnational narrative, their legacy will be to uphold IWM’s mission statement: to communicate a deeper understanding about how our global society was – and is – affected by the causes, course, and consequences of war.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vikki Hawkins

Vikki Hawkins has been a Curator at Imperial War Museums since 2016. She previously delivered ‘Wounded: Conflict Casualties and Care’, an exhibition at the Science Museum which drew on First World War medical collections. In her current role creating IWM's new Second World War Galleries, Vikki has contributed to various conferences on the topic of Displaying Marginalised Histories in Museums, and is currently developing a research project on the Material Culture of Sexual Violence in Conflict.