War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes which have led to this development, among them the passing of the two World Wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the centre of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood.

Contents:
Part I. Framing the Issues
1. The politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper
Part II. Case Studies
2. Layers of memory: twenty years after in Argentina Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman
3. The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 and political memory in South Africa Bill Nasson
4. National narratives, war commemoration, and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case Ann Curthoys
5. 'This is where they fought': Finnish war landscapes as a national heritage Petri J. Raivo
6. Remembered/Replayed: the nation and male subjectivity in the Second World War films, Ni Liv (Norway) and The Cruel Sea (Britain) Peter Sjølyst-Jackson
7. Postmemory cinema: second-generation Israelis screen the Holocaust in Don't Touch My Holocaust Yosefa Loshitzky
8. Hauntings: memory, fiction, and the Portuguese Colonial Wars Paulo de Medeiros
9. Longing for war: nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War Stephen Garton
10. Involuntary commemorations: post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship to war commemoration Jo Stanley
Part III. Debates and Reviews
11. War commemoration in Western Europe: changing meanings, divisive loyalties, unheard voices T.G. Ashplant

Afterlives documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of descendants to the contemporary memory of the First World War, and the intimate personal legacies of the conflict that animate their history-making. -- .

What did home mean to British soldiers and how did it help them to cope with the psychological strains of the Great War? Family relationships lie at the heart of this book. It explores the contribution letters and parcels from home played in maintaining the morale of this largely young, amateur army. And it shows how soldiers, in their turn, sought to adapt domestic habits to the trenches. Pursuing the unconscious clues within a rich collection of letters and memoirs with the help of psychoanalytical ideas, including those formulated by the veteran tank commander Wilfred Bion, this study asks fundamental questions about the psychological resources of this generation of young men. It reveals how the extremities of battle exposed the deepest emotional ties of childhood, and went on marking the post-war domestic lives of those who returned. -- .

Masculine assertions, whether of verbal command, political power or physical violence, have formed the traditional subject matter of history. This volume combines current discussions in sexual politics with historical analysis to demonstrate that, far from being natural and monolithic, masculinity is an historical and cultural construct, with varied, competing and above all changing forms.;The contributors draw on literature, cultural studies and sociology to explore the history and representations of masculinity from 1800 to the 1980s, with examples ranging from Thomas Carlyle and the 19th-century "man of letters" to the post-World War II "company man". Making men visible as gendered subjects within the accepted historical categories of family, business and labour, class and nation, the text describes how - in the past as in the contemporary world - masculinities need to be understood as subjective identity, as social power and as cultural representation.

The post-war period is often regarded as a time when Britain underwent its managerial revolution, the family firm and the "gentleman amateur" giving way to the large bureaucracy and the trained management expert. Yet the conception of modern management as an objective process could hardly be further from the truth. Drawing on detailed life-history interviews with the post-war generation of "organization men", this study explores the intimacies that operate among men in management. It argues that despite the rise of professional management, relations between managers continue to function in highly subjective ways. The pleasure of technical innovation or of seeing a new product through to the market, the mixture of rivalry and patronage that surrounds management succession, the hard bargaining of industrial relations: at every level, managerial functions involve the dramatization of emotions among men. By challenging the enduring myth of the rational organization man, this book sheds new light on gender segregation in management. It argues that the exclusion of women from senior positions cannot be understood simply as the outcome of unprofessional practices. A focus on the emotional relations between male managers reveals the psychic dimensions of exclusionary behaviour. An "emotional economy" flourishes among men in management, but its workings have been hidden by the myth of the rational organization man.