Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 15

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N.

Jones

Introduction Constructions of Conf lict: Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media

This volume explores the ways in which memories of social, political and military conf licts have been transmitted through twentieth- and twentyfirst-century European historiography, culture and media, and the diverse representations, or constructions of conf lict, that have emerged as a result. It constitutes the third and final output of the international conference Constructions of Conflict: Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Literature and Media, hosted by the Modern European Ideologies, Conflict and Memory Research Group (MEICAM) at Swansea University in September 2007,1 and can be read productively in conjunction with the two other conference outputs, special issue on memories of conf lict in Eastern Europe and perpetrator memories respectively.2 From its inception, the Constructions of Conf lict conference was envisaged as a transnational, interdisciplinary event, both in terms of the identity of its contributors British, European, American and Antipodean academics from the fields of archaeology, conf lict studies, film, geography, history, literature, media, politics and sociology and in terms of the content of their presentations. Participants were invited, within a European

1 2

<http://www.swan.ac.uk/meicam/conferences2007/> [accessed 22 July 2010]. Nicola Cooper and Kathryn N. Jones, eds, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, special issue on Memories of Conf lict in Eastern Europe, 17.1 (2009); Jonathan Dunnage, ed., Memory Studies, special issue on Perpetrator Memories and Memories about Perpetrators, 3.2 (2010).

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

framework, to interpret the term conf lict in its broadest sense, resulting in forty highly diverse papers on military warfare, colonial wars, wars of independence, ethnic conf lict, genocide, war crimes, state oppression, civil protest and terrorism. These papers considered, among other issues, the roles played by those who mediate memories of conf lict (such as first-hand witnesses, historians, journalists, writers, film-makers and bloggers); the kinds of interactions and tensions visible between public and private discourses of memory; the ways memories of conf lict (or their absence) are shaped by the political, economic and social parameters of the present, and the ends to which narratives of the past are deployed. The overall aims of the conference were to gauge the breadth of current international research on constructions of conf lict and to facilitate dialogue between researchers working in dif ferent fields, especially in relation to theories of memory and the transmission of memories of conf lict. Our three keynote speakers played a particularly important role in posing overarching questions for conference participants to consider. Essays developed from the two keynote lectures by historians Mary Fulbrook and John Foot, on patterns of memory and divided memories respectively, appear in this volume. We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution to the conference of Alan Marcus, whose presence as an academic practitioner and film-maker provided participants with alternative visual perspectives on the transmission of the memory of the Holocaust. His keynote address included a screening of the practice-as-research film Beautiful Dachau (2006), whose title was drawn from a poster on a bus shelter outside the citys former concentration camp that read: Beautiful Dachau, things to see and do. The film explores the often problematic incorporation of the camp into the citys tourist industry, the symbolic significance of place in the act of memorialisation, and the role of digital cultures especially cameras in shaping the memory of the Holocaust for visitors, the majority of whom were not yet alive when the camp was in operation.3 The film opens up questions about collective memory, cultural memory and postmemory, and these provided illuminating points of departure for discussion at the conference.
3 <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace/video_installation.php> [accessed 22 July 2010].

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

Like the Constructions of Conf lict conference, the eleven chapters in this volume explore a wide variety of conf licts from 1914 to 2009, including not only mainstream military conf licts, but conf licts that are political or social in nature, together with extreme manifestations of civil protest and acts of terrorism. Key twentieth-century military conf licts that saw active European involvement such as the First and Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Falklands War, the Bosnian War and the Gulf War provide the focus for a number of chapters. In addition, the volume explores various twentieth- and twenty-first-century political/ social conf licts and terrorist actions in the context of Francos dictatorship and post-Franco Spain; the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1972 Munich Olympics; the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. The latter are considered alongside reactions to the shooting of Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan in Iran during the political protests of 2009. As this brief summary illustrates, the volume is transnational, exploring constructions of conf lict in diverse and multiple national contexts, including those of East/West Germany, post-reunification Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Great Britain and Iran. While the volumes central focus arguably remains Western European,4 its scope is also inevitably international, a ref lection both of far-reaching troop movements in times of war and the more recent globalising ef fects of digital technologies. As Andreas Huyssen observes, national memory debates are always shot through with the ef fects of the global media.5 In conceiving of and positioning the volume as transnational one that reaches beyond national boundaries we seek to move beyond the limits of nation-based studies on memory and war, encouraging the emergence of comparative perspectives that allow the
4 For an examination of memories of conf lict in Eastern Europe, see Cooper and Jones. This special issue examines the memorialisation of the Berlin Wall and border crossings; journalistic responses to war reporting during the Bosnian War and Balkan conf licts; the post-war remembrance of Croatian identities through popular and traditional music; conf licting representations of Chetnik leader Draa Mihailovi, and post-Miloevi responses to the Srebrenica massacre. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 16.

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

similarities and dif ferences between localised constructions of conf lict to become more clearly visible. Comparisons of divergent national cultures can be used to highlight issues of national identity and cultural selfrepresentation, and draw attention to the roles played by the nation in the construction of common patterns of remembrance or, indeed, in the creation of new ones. All of the volumes chapters examine the roles played by agents and mediators of memory, including protesters, soldiers, veterans, politicians, policemen, sports of ficials, historians, journalists, film-makers, bloggers, writers and, by extension, their fictional characters.6 These, in turn, occupy positions either as first-hand witnesses, as the bearers of another individuals memory, or as recorders of individual and collective memories in historical or other public narratives. In the process, the chapters explore the interaction among three contrasting vectors of memory of ficial or state memories, public or political memories, and private or personal memories as well as the nature and inf luence of dif ferent carriers of memory, such as historical narratives; commemorative ceremonies; monuments and memorials; literature; visual representations such as films, graphic novels and photographs; and the new media of the World Wide Web and mobile phones.7

For an examination of perpetrator memory and memories about perpetrators, see Dunnage. This special issue features articles on the evolution of Giorgio Perlasca as a complex symbolic figure in public memory constructs of the Holocaust in Italy; the depiction of the Nazi perpetrator in Jonathan Littells novel The Kindly Ones; the positioning of the French-Algerian harkis in collective memory of the Algerian War of Independence; representations of Germanys Red Army Faction in the print media and in biographies, and the depiction of the East German Stasi in the film The Lives of Others. French historian Henry Rousso conceives of vectors of memory as cultural and political practices that organize the representation of the past, charged with representing and transmitting a societys relationship to its past, whereas carriers of memory are deliberate reconstructions of past events for a social purpose. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 219 and Nancy

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

Conf licts between diverse forms of memory ensure that discussions and debates about how to represent the past continue to develop.8 This volume puts forward a pluralist notion of memory as dialogue, exploring the interaction between multiple, competing memory discourses.9 Such a dialectical model of memories draws on historian Mary Fulbrooks concept of public discourses and continuing collective conversations about the past as opposed to a homogeneous or unified collective memory.10 The concept of discourses of memory thus refers to a dynamic ensemble of ways of speaking about and representing a shared past, an ongoing process that can incorporate conf lict and change. Nonetheless, and as a number of this volumes chapters show, not all voices are accorded equal prominence, and at dif ferent times some can be heard more clearly than others. As Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan remind us, the weight of various memories in the process of collective remembrance is by no means equal, and the

9 10

Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Post-War Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 56. At the time of writing, the publication by Wikileaks of the Afghan war logs has focused renewed attention on the role played by the contemporary media in disputing of ficial constructions of conf lict. The leaking of over 90,000 classified US military records from between 2004 and 2009 has challenged the image of the tidied up and sanitised public war [] glimpsed through of ficial communiqus [of the coalition forces]. The editor, Afghanistan: The Unvarnished Picture, The Guardian, 26 July 2010, p. 36. Moreover, by allowing The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times to access these documents in advance of their online release, Wikileaks has encouraged the construction of a powerful set of media counter-narratives relating to the conf lict, which highlight the apparent failure of coalition military strategy and the cost to ordinary Afghan civilians of the war. Declan Walsh, Read between the Lines for the Story of Afghanistans Civilians, The Guardian, 27 July 2010, pp. 67. For an exploration of this approach see Kathryn N. Jones, Journeys of Remembrance: Memories of the Second World War in French and German Literature, 19601980 (Oxford: Legenda, 2007). Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity, 1999), p. 144 and p. 146.

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

underlying power dynamics between interlocutors in discourses of memory should not be forgotten.11 Dialogues of and on memory, visible both as an area of inquiry within conference papers and in the discussions they generated between contributors, are continued and extended within this volume. The relationship between memory and history, problematised by Mary Fulbrook in the volumes opening chapter, is taken up in both John Foot and M. Cinta Ramblado Mineros contributions. In addition to discussing memory constructs, chapters by Claire Gorrara, Noel D. Cary and Ramblado Minero highlight the significance of selective remembrance or amnesia. The interaction of generational memories and the role of succeeding generations in remembering previous conf licts are explored by Jennifer Cameron, Ramblado Minero, Monica Jansen and Inge Lanslots, and Patrick Finney, while the transmission of memory to and by a generation of neither witnesses nor historical actors, who rely on postmemory rather than memory, is also examined by Finney and Ramblado Minero. Gorrara, Cary and Vanda Wilcox consider how constructions of conflict by a nation are challenged in France (via crime narratives), in East/West Germany (through newspapers) and in Italy (through private memorials and commemorative practices), respectively. The chapters by Wilcox, Foot and Jansen/Lanslots form part of a particularly vibrant and illuminating dialogue on the ways in which Italian memories have been characterised by conf lict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Furthermore, the chapters by Gorrara, Cameron and Ramblado Minero discuss issues of gender, exploring constructions of masculinity and femininity in the context of wider narratives of conf lict and war. Anna Reading and Jansen/Lanslots consider the inf luence of new media and technologies both in terms of how these are changing the ways we receive and think about memory, and how new ways to remember conflict are being created. Jansen/Lanslots, Reading, and Rachel Woodward, K. Neil Jenkings and

11

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, Introduction, in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 139 (p. 27).

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

Trish Winter examine the role of images and photographs in mediating constructions of conf lict. Their analyses demonstrate the potency of images as instruments of witnessing and autobiographical memory-work, and draw out revealing contrasts between the use of visual images by combatants to record memories of their own experiences on the one hand, and to portray victims of police violence and terrorism on the other. Parallels can be drawn between the chapters on soldiers (auto)biographies by Woodward/ Jenkings/Winter and Cameron, which thematise the interplay between individual and familial memories in representations of military conf lict by active participants. Several chapters underline the talismanic quality of memory-objects, which are used to express both intensely private and personal memories (Woodward/Jenkings/Winter) and conf licting political memories (Foot), and also demonstrate the commodification of memory in the form of touristic artefacts (Finney). The contributions to this volume are interdisciplinary in nature, employing a variety of historiographical, literary, visual and sociological approaches, and typically illuminate a set of issues or theoretical concerns through reference to specific conf licts and the cultural texts that engage with their legacy. The volumes eleven chapters are organised thematically into three sections: Public and Private Discourses of Memory, CounterMemories, and Commemorative Practices. The first section draws attention to the power and vibrancy of memory discourses in British, German and global contexts. The chapters explore the tensions inherent in the dialogue between public and private memory discourses and demonstrate how private memories can problematise or counter political appropriations of historical events. The opening chapter, Fulbrooks Patterns of Memory, raises many of the key issues that will be addressed by subsequent chapters, interrogating the nature of memory in individual and collective contexts, patterns of memory in relation to historical experiences, and the significance of memory in a later present. Drawing on the work of a number of theorists, Fulbrook shows that, even on a purely individual level, the articulation of memory is a cultural and social phenomenon: the selection, conceptualisation, narrative shaping and emotive expression of personal memories is also in large part a product of political and cultural context, integrally related to social identity. However, while there is a substantial body of

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

literature on the topics of memory and collective identity in European contexts, Fulbrook argues that attempts to bring together the two levels of analysis the allegedly personal and the clearly collective remain highly problematic. In the course of her chapter, she explores the ways in which the private is always political, and demonstrates why constructions of past conf licts matter and have relevance in the real world. Camerons chapter, Categorically Complicit: Generation Discourse in Contemporary German Literature, explores shifting representations of generational conf lict emerging from the Nazi era in two German autobiographical family novels: Christoph Meckels Suchbild: ber meinen Vater [Picture Puzzle: About my Father] (1980) and Stephan Wackwitzs Ein unsichtbares Land [An Invisible Land] (2003). Cameron shows how these texts are representative of two trends in post-war German literature: Vterliteratur [father literature], written in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, and Generationenromane [generation novels], first published in the wake of German reunification, which share a narrative strategy of delving into the author/narrators family history in order to transpose the national crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich onto a familial or generational matrix. Camerons analysis of the novels, which builds on the theoretical work on family, generation and memory by Aleida Assmann, Sigrid Weigel, Friederike Eigler and Anne Fuchs, outlines a crucial transformation in the way such novels approach the past. While Meckels novel uses his fathers army service to set up an irresolvable generational conf lict and to claim an identity for himself independent of that past, Wackwitz uses his familys roots in the German-speaking region around Auschwitz to draw a connecting line of identifications through three generations and attempts to defuse the Nazi era as a source of familial conf lict. The chapter provides an insight both into a change in representations of memories of the Third Reich, but also into the specifically masculine investigations of the authors roles in post-war German society. Woodward, Jenkings and Winters chapter, Negotiating Military Identities, forms part of their Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study on ex-service personnels accounts of their military identity, which includes memories of serving in the UK armed forces and their deployment during the Northern Ireland conf lict and the Bosnian,

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

Falklands and Gulf Wars. Sixteen servicemen and ex-servicemen were interviewed in depth about ten photos or memory-objects they had selected from their own photograph collections of service in the military. What emerge from these interviews are very individual experiences of very familiar conf licts in public memory, as well as current accounts of what impact and role those memories have for the servicemen in the present. The chapter proposes that photographs contain memory in two senses: acting as repositories of memory on the one hand, and setting limits around it on the other, in order to make dif ficult memories feel safe. Such personal accounts and uses of photographs contrast with the often iconic and stereotyped photographs of conf licts that are presented in print media. The authors conclude that individual accounts from military personnel who have policed many of the conf licts in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries constitute a significant addition to our understanding of the meanings of these conf licts. In her chapter Globital Witnessing, Reading examines the emergence of a globital memory field, a term she has coined to designate the entwined social and political dynamics of digitisation with globalisation, by means of two case studies which demonstrate the impact of the camera phone on contemporary communications and memory cultures. Reading suggests that the camera phone provides a new kind of public record, a countergaze against more powerful institutions and organizations, and argues that camera phone witnessing has become the norm since the terrorist attacks on the London Transport systems in July 2005, with the dynamics of mobile witnessing extending through social networking sites. This was shown on 2021 June 2009 when the camera phone video of the shooting of a twenty-six-year-old Iranian philosophy student, Neda Salehi AghaSoltan, was rapidly circulated and viewed around the world. Using Deleuze and Guattaris concept of assemblage, the chapter compares and contrasts these examples of mobile witnessing, whose material practices and discursive formations are subject to dif fering processes of (de)territorialisation. The second section of the volume creates a dialogue between a number of dissonant voices, and explores how writers, film-makers, historians, journalists and protesters construct counter-memories of conflict. The chapters illustrate the innovative and varied ways in which memories that have been

10

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

marginalised by of ficial/state narratives can be unearthed and recovered. The opening chapter, Gorraras Conf licted Masculinities, examines French crime narratives of the late 1940s and 1950s, showing how these widely disseminated forms of popular culture participated in public debates over the legacy of war and the fraught process of national reconstruction in the post-war era. The chapter discusses the works of three novelists Jean Meckert, Andr Hlna and Gilles Morris who engage with the complex processes of memory selection and formation in the aftermath of the Second World War. From memories of defeat, resistance and liberation to ambiguities of collaboration and pervasive memories of suf fering and deprivation, these novels propose radically dif ferent perspectives on the dark years of German occupation, suf fused in a noir aesthetic of oppression and entrapment. At the same time, they interrogate the idealised post-war image of the male resister, challenging national myths of heroic French resistance through the positioning of the resister as noir anti-hero. In allying politics and aesthetics, Gorrara argues, such noir narratives of fer the present-day reader an alternative cultural history of post-war France in which the voices of the dispossessed, excluded and marginalised take centre stage. In so doing, the texts reformulate conventional memories of war and conf lict and challenge perceptions of perpetrators and victims, of the victors and the vanquished. Ramblado Mineros chapter explores how the Thirteen Roses thirteen women imprisoned, tried and executed on 5 August 1939 in Madrid have gained new significance in present-day Spain, due to the social movement for the recovery of historical memory and the success of a number of texts and films about the Roses that have appeared since 2000. While this new visibility is positive in many respects, Ramblado Minero argues that it also involves a number of risks due to the problematic relationship between history and fiction and, consequently, the positioning of women in history and the representation of their experience in literature and film. Using the concepts of the war story (Miriam Cooke) and postmemory (Marianne Hirsch), the chapter explores these issues through a comparative analysis of four works, Jess Ferreros novel Las trece rosas [The Thirteen Roses] (2003), Carlos Fonsecas Las trece rosas rojas [The Thirteen Red Roses] (2004), Vernica Vigil and Jos Mara Almelas documentary Que

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

11

mi nombre no se borre de la historia [Dont Let my Name Be Erased from History] (2006), and Emilio Martnez-Lzaros feature film Las trece rosas [The Thirteen Roses] (2007). Carys chapter on Memory Games examines how the public construction of discourses of memory in East and West Germany drew implicit or explicit comparisons between the Munich Games of 1972 and the Berlin Games of 1936, and highlights significant continuities as well as concerted ef forts to break with the past. Focusing on the Munich organizers and the mainstream printed press, the chapter surveys newspapers, commemorative literature and East German polemical material. Its analysis draws attention to important debates that occurred before the Games, prior to the murder of Jewish athletes on German soil by Palestinian terrorists an event that triggered the very memory of the Holocaust the Games were designed to supplant. While exploring how Cold War issues af fected both Eastern and Western memory renditions, this chapter particularly underlines how West Germans worked on negotiating the gap between private and public memory, and charts the emergence of a series of counter-narratives relating to the Nazi past. In their chapter Mediating Memories of the Genoa G8, Jansen and Lanslots investigate the ways in which the death of Carlo Giuliani, a young activist shot by a policeman on the first day of the G8 summit held in July 2001 in Genoa, has become the primary focus of G8 remembrance through the construction of a number of counter-memories. The chapter explores the role of individuals in collective remembering via the inclusion of their personal points of view (Halbwachs) within potential master narratives of Genoa 2001 and Giulianis death, before studying the representation of Giulianis memory within the frames of dif ferent audio-visual media (including photographs), memorial literature and graphic novels. Their analysis of crime writer Carlo Lucarellis Blu Notte episode on Genoa 2001, produced for RAI television in 2007, illustrates the interaction between individual and collective memory, and asks whether Lucarellis synthesis succeeds in becoming a collective form of remembrance, not only on a local level, but also on a transnational level of cultural memory. The third section of the volume highlights the dif ficulty of establishing common commemorative practices to remember conflicts throughout

12

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chapters thematise the ways in which commemorations and sites of memory can also become sources of conf lict and division. In her chapter Public Ceremonies, Private Mourning, Wilcox explores the reactions of the Roman public to fascisms attempts to transform the First World War into a mythical unifying experience that had led inexorably to the fascist movement. The Roman public in particular was bombarded with symbolic and textual representations of 191518 through speeches, public ritual, monumental art and architecture and public commemoration became increasingly homogeneous and politically laden as the 1920s progressed. Yet individuals, families and private groups remembered the war in ways which did not always correspond with the fascist rhetoric, diverging from a politically constructed narrative that left little space for grief, mourning or resistance. Wilcox argues that a highly textured picture emerges of the interplay between individual and collective memory, and the tensions between memory and commemoration. A wide variety of sources from photographs, newspaper reports and family-produced obituary publications to memorial inscriptions, funerary monuments and public memorials is used to reveal a broad range of approaches to the conf lict and the evolution of these ideas over time. Through close analysis of these materials, Wilcox interrogates the complex and problematic relationship between the political memory and the social and cultural memory of the First World War. The point of departure for Foots chapter on Divided Memories in Italy is the conventional distinction made between history (in the sense of historiography) as an authoritative (albeit disputed) form of public record, usually written or transmitted through public channels, and memory as generally unwritten, often private and lacking public authority, transmitted in multifarious ways and channels. Foot argues that this distinction needs to be retained, given that history and memory intersect in complicated ways, creating and re-creating narratives about the past which vie for position within political and cultural spheres of various kinds. He goes on to examine the tendency in contemporary Italian history towards divided memory, which has resulted in contrasting interpretations of events in which the facts themselves are often contested, making it extremely dif ficult to create any consensus around memory. Through a focus on two

Introduction Constructions of Conflict

13

specific historical events the bombing of a church in Tuscany in 1944 and the death of an anarchist in Milan in 1969 Foot contends that Italy has started to institutionalise these divisions over memory. He concludes that the Italian state has decided to accept division, even to the point of allowing dif ferent versions of events to become part of various forms of public memory, which in many cases ref lect divisions within private and politicised memories. Finally, Finneys chapter examines the diverse discourses of memory in play during the commemorations of the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day in June 2004. The chapter opens with an examination of the participants in the Normandy commemorations (returning veterans, tourists consuming memorabilia, historical re-enactors paying imitative homage) and an exploration of how the formal commemorative ceremonies, featuring representatives from almost all the combatant powers, refracted the events of D-Day through various prisms of national identity and contemporary political imperative. Finney argues that in this collision of authentic personal remembering, debasing commerce, ersatz heritage experience and political agendas, the D-Day commemorations encapsulated much of the ambiguity and complexity of the current moment of war memory. As the author of the final chapter in this volume, is it fitting that Finney draws attention to debates around the issue of a caesura, particularly in relation to memories of the Second World War. Finney interrogates the claim in journalistic commentary that the commemorations embodied a transitional act of closure over the wartime past, a passing of the torch out of the aged hands of living memory and into the grasp of history.12 He asserts that such claims were marked not only by conceptual imprecision but also by a peculiar amnesia, as they elided persistent endeavours, evident since 1945, to proclaim the post-war era at an end. In fact, the long Second World War has proved remarkably resistant to such calls for its transcendence, and the 2004 commemorations demonstrate how firmly it remains embedded as a cultural reference point, with its legacy

12

Jonathan Freedland, Sixty Years On, D-Day Veterans Pass Torch into Hands of History, The Guardian, 7 June 2004, p. 1.

14

Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones

and meaning still contested, available and potent as a means of advancing extremely diverse political, social, cultural and economic aims. The volumes chapters underline that memory as a concept is never fixed or static, but is constantly shifting and evolving. Agents of memory are key players in complex ideological struggles over memories of the recent past, which constitute ongoing processes of negotiation. Rather than attempting to draw a decisive line under the past, the eleven contributions to this volume engage in a continuing conversation about means of representing and constructing conf lict, a reciprocal exchange which takes on new forms and incorporates additional voices over time. The editors wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their cooperation and hard work throughout the editing process; MEICAM members Nicola Cooper, Jonathan Dunnage and Jane Dunnett for their collaboration and invaluable support throughout the Constructions of Conf lict project; the Swansea University Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH) for financial support; series editors Christian Emden and David Midgley, and commissioning editors Graham Speake and Laurel Plapp at Peter Lang, for their generous assistance in steering this volume successfully to completion; Jonathan Dunnage, Kate Grif fiths and Ute Keller for reading sections of the manuscript; and our families, as ever, for their unstinting support. Swansea and Porth Tywyn, Wales, July 2010

You might also like