Memorialising Britain's 9/11 wars: the politics of military deaths

Prof Vron Ware (Kingston)

While considerable attention has been paid to historic war memorials that stand as testament to colonial and genocidal crimes, the construction of new monuments commemorating military deaths in current and recent wars has largely escaped public scrutiny. This presentation will take a critical look at several new war memorials which have been built both during and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking how they came to be there in those particular forms. In doing so, it will ask how these new monuments speak to contemporary questions of Britain’s postcolonial national identity. What do they tell us about what those wars were for, and why are the politics of race and gender so important in analyzing the force of militarism today?

About the speaker

Vron Ware is currently a professor of sociology and gender studies at Kingston University. Her book Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history was first published in 1991 (reissued in 2015) and she has written widely on racism and feminism, the social construction of whiteness and the politics of anti-racism, including Out of Whiteness: color, politics, culture with Les Back (2002). More recently she has published books and articles about militarism and militarisation. Since 2015 she has been engaged in a Swedish project called ‘The Politics of Military Loss in the Afghanistan War’ which looks at the impact of social deaths in six different countries in Europe.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk