African silences: Negotiating the story of France's colonial soldiers, 1914–2009

Remaking memory and the agency of the aesthetic

“…6 According to Santanu Das, the public recovery and celebration of the memory of the Indian troops has been especially important in giving Asian-Britons a public stake in the national narrative about the Great War and hence in consolidating and legitimising their integration into contemporary British society (even if this is at the cost, as Das (2018: 406–417) warns, of overlooking their subordinate status in the army and the excessive suffering they endured in the cold trenches of Northern France). Ginio (2010) has also linked the renewed commemoration of colonial troops in France to ‘perceived strategic necessities in the present’ (p. 139) regarding the integration of citizens from former colonies while warning that commemoration also risks being instrumentalised to deflect attention away from the ongoing legacy of colonial inequality. Be this as it may, the growing attention to the colonial dimensions of the war has been regularly welcomed in headlines as a long overdue breaking of a silence: ‘Indians in the trenches: voices of forgotten army are finally to be heard’; ‘Why the Indian soldiers of WW1 were forgotten’; ‘The untold story of the Indian Army’; ‘Part of our history that should be declared Not Forgotten.’ 7…”

“…People failed to register and hence remember the violence, Bijl (2015) argues, because they had no narrative frame to make sense of what was before their eyes; at least, no narrative frame that did not undermine an ingrained sense of Eurocentric entitlement. Although her terms are different, Ginio (2010) explains the disregard for colonial soldiers along similar lines: 'Those who do not symbolise or embody a story with an accepted moral message are bound to be ignored' (p. 44). Such aphasia involves not only an unwillingness, but an actual incapacity to see due to a fear of unsettlement and of being implicated and, underlying this, an imaginative failure to recognise the limitations of existing narrative frames.…”

Decolonizing Flanders fields: Flemish Great War commemoration and the agency of literature

“…That these porters and soldiers from the colonies have failed to find a place in Flemish cultural memory (Nsayi, 2018; Van Ypersele and Ngongo, 2018) is all the more conspicuous given developments in other countries. In France, the contribution of colonial troops has increasingly been highlighted (Ginio, 2010), while in Britain, it is especially the memory of Indian soldiers that has gained prominence over the last decade (Das, 2018; Wellings, 2016: 103–105). As Ann Rigney (2021: 11) notes, “the interest in colonial troops .…”

Book reviews: De fosas comunes a lugares de memoria. La práctica monumental como escritura de la historia [From mass graves to places of memory. Monument practice as writing of history] Daniel Palacios González

“…As shown through multiple examples in the book, there are grounds for questioning whether the institutional tiptoeing around the Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship might be equated with forgetfulness, or whether the absence of public discussion around these events during the Spanish transition to democracy signals the presence of a past very much alive throughout different generations in Spain. If, as Ginio (2010) points out, 'silence is heavy; it is substantial' (p. 138), it can be argued that 'breaking a conspiracy of silence involves acknowledging the presence of the elephant in the room' (Zerubavel, 2010: 41). In that regard, amid the silence that has until recently surrounded the presence of Francoist monuments and thousands of mass graves across Spain, this book comes as a necessary reminder of the importance of monument practices in re-signifying the country's memory landscape through the voice of those who call for truth, justice and reparation.…”