Description: This volume brings together an international cast of scholars from a variety of fields to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War, and show how issues of race and empire shaped its literature and culture. The global nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus of intense inquiry. This book analyses European discourses about colonial participation and recovers the war experience of different racial, ethnic and national groups, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Maori, West Africans and Jamaicans. It also investigates testimonial and literary writings, from war diaries and nursing memoirs to Irish, New Zealand and African American literature, and analyses processes of memory and commemoration in the former colonies and dominions. Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict's reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.
Brief description: Santanu Das is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London and is author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Review Quotes: "The achievement of this wide-ranging and revelatory collection of essays is to bring these suppressed aspects of the First World War experience back into the light of day. ... Together, the essays in Race, Empire and First World War Writing cast a vivid and long-overdue spotlight on the complex intersections between war, race, and the colonial experience."
Edmund G. C. King, Wasafiri