Decolonizing the Memory of the First World War

Anna Branach-Kallas is a professor at the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.

Here is finally the much-needed book which investigates with insight and astuteness the work of contemporary novelists of colour responding to the First World War and unravelling its tangled ideologies and legacies. Powerful, passionate and perceptive, Decolonizing the Memory of the First World War shows how literature remains a singular force in challenging the colour of war memory, stretching its contours and replacing reductive vocabularies with ever-more difficult questions about ourselves and our pasts. This is a truly wonderful contribution to the conjoined worlds of war, memory and postcolonial studies.-Professor Santanu Das, All Souls College, Oxford, UKIn her sophisticated and fully contextualised decolonial analysis of First World War novels, Anna Branach-Kallas reveals how contemporary authors' evocation of minoritized experiences of war and empire helps us to see afresh the traumatic legacies of the conflict on those who fought it. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students in both literature and history departments.-Professor Alison Fell, University of Liverpool, UKCombining First World War studies and postcolonial studies, this book makes a vital contribution to countering Eurocentric memories of the Great War. It provides gripping analyses of centenary novels that expose the racial ideologies which have made the experience of coloured colonial soldiers a sadly neglected history.-Professor Martin Löschnigg, University of Graz, AustriaMuch as the literature of the First World War has prospered in numerous countries for decades, writers have, to date, largely overlooked contributions by soldiers of colour. Providentially, their previous commitments are now analyzed in two French novels, one British novel, one novel from South Africa and one woman’s Pakistani novel, all of whom, according to Anna Branach-Kallas, share an intention to decolonize their memories of the First World War. -Dr Donna Coates, Associate Professor Emerita, University of Calgary, Canada

• IntroductionChapter One: Savagery, Epistemic Disobedience and Disabled Memory in At Night All Blood Is Black by David DiopChapter Two: Palimpsests of Disaster, Maroonage and the French Republican Discourse in Le Bataillon créole (Guerre de 1914-1918) by Raphaël ConfiantChapter Three: Biopolitics, Dreams of Freedom and Multidirectional Memory in Dancing the Death Drill by Fred KhumaloChapter Four: Imperial Loyalties, Decolonial Insurgency and Potential History in A God in Every Stone by Kamila ShamsieChapter Five: The Colonial Modern, Mimicry and the Aesthetics/Ethics of Incompletion in Afterlives by Abdulrazak GurnahConclusion