‘The trophies of their wars’: affect and encounter at the Canadian War Museum

Matthews, Sara

doi:10.1080/09647775.2013.807994

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The tendency in military museums has been toward the display of relics that are treated as war trophies (Matthews 2013). Military museums may also engage in forms of nationalist memorialization, and these practices may deflect attention from complicity in colonialism or atrocities of war (Mead 2012).…”

Section: Museums and Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations of Surveillance and Perceptual Technologies at Military Museums

Walby

Pauls

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing from fieldwork at military museums across Manitoba, Canada, we explore the objects and narratives used to curate museum displays featuring what Bousquet (2018) calls “military perception.” Using Bousquet’s categories of military perception to organize our analysis, we examine how these museums position scopes, sonars, camouflage, and other devices meant to create visibility or invisibility as aesthetic objects rather than as instruments enabling state violence. With a focus on curatorial strategies and the arrangement of objects at these museums, we explore how surveillance and camouflage displays are organized to minimize the harm that military interventions cause and align the affect of the viewer with the form of Canadian nationalism animating the museum and against “enemy” others and spaces, a process we refer to as encasement. In conclusion, we reflect on what our analysis adds to literature on military museums and representations of surveillance.

show abstract

Section: Museums and Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representations of Surveillance and Perceptual Technologies at Military Museums

Walby

Pauls

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Applying Sara Ahmed's conception of the "encounter," which usefully "suggests a meeting, but a meeting which involves surprise and conflict," 4 helps alert us toward the tensions involved in the interactions between intelligence officers and German civilians, and the limits of what can be known. 5 As we shall see in this particular context, it also points us to the tension between intelligence officers' analyses and the ways in which they were put to use.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Good Bets, Bad Bets and Dark Horses: Allied Intelligence Officers’ Encounters with German Civilians, 1944–1945

Rauch

2020

Cent Eur Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores Allied intelligence officers’ encounters with and interrogations of German civilians from autumn 1944 onwards, psychological warfare operations directed at civilians, and their wider ramifications. Focusing especially on the officers serving with the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), I will demonstrate that field intelligence officers’ stance towards German civilians was fluid and often ambiguous, with the encounter causing considerable distress to some of them. Their reports and correspondence further suggest that in this period, Germans readily professed knowledge of atrocities. But contrary to intelligence officers’ expectations, they failed to accept any guilt or responsibility. Finally, I will argue that the very foundations and techniques of Western Allied psychological warfare may have reinforced and legitimised justification strategies that separated between “real” Nazis and everyone else. This was at odds with one of the central aims of Military Government, i.e. to inculcate a sense of culpability in Germans.

show abstract