Friday, October 30th 10:45 – 12:15

Session Room: Miss Lou’s Room

1) Jennifer Boum Make, University of Pittsburgh
Strategies of textual hijacking in Proust's Finding Time Again: Resisting national representations of war during WWI

The outbreak of World War I in France suspended the publication of Remembrance of Things Past by French author, Marcel Proust, whose first volume was published in 1913. The second, Within a Budding Grove, was not published until 1919. It is therefore evident that Proust’s literary masterpiece is intricately linked with historical transformations and cannot be dissociated from the national agenda. This paper examines ways in which the literary text mediates and qualifies national representations of war. In fact in the last volume Finding Time Again, published posthumously in 1927, one episode focuses specifically on 1916 Paris and reconstitutes the multiple entities of the deployment to war. Ignorant of frontline realities due to their physical disability, both Proust and his narrator remain at the rear, with access to information only through extensive wartime brainwashing in newspaper articles. Proust’s vivid responses against national effort to construct and manipulate historical accounts of what happened on the battlefields in his contemporary epistolary exchanges, and wartime press handled in a pastiche manner, recast the correspondence between French historical landscape during WWI and Proust’s stance regarding the events and the necessity to defend and redefine the French nation.

What becomes of the interdiscursive rapport between Proust’s text and its politico-cultural context?  I argue that this episode of Finding Time Again constitutes a direct literary intervention designed to hijack the propagandist potential of political and journalistic discourses. By reclaiming their potency through writing, both author and narrator renegotiate their physical distance from the front and deconstruct single narratives of WWI. Occurrences of manipulation of wartime press within the text not only shed light on the mechanisms of mass rallying of national consciousness and patriotism, but also reveals ways in which any prescribed single national identity can be shattered by creating multiple loci of authority.

2) Priya Dixit, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia
“We’ve been in all the wars”: Analyzing (un)belonging and citizenship through Nepali Gurkha and Indigenous Australian experiences in World War One

Recent scholarship about World War One (WWI) has studied it from the perspective of “ordinary people” and the everyday (e.g. Tamari 2011; Singh 2014), but there have been fewer attempts to ask whose “everyday” is included in these accounts. Drawing from Subaltern historians and Indigenous scholars, this paper explores whether research on “ordinary people” and their experiences in wars acts as a means for furthering inequality in terms of whose experiences of war then becomes dominant in narrating and memorializing wars and the related construction of national identity.

By concentrating on experiences of Nepali Gurkhas and Indigenous Australians in WWI, this paper raises questions about subjectivity and nationalism. At the same time, the lack of sources about Indigenous/colonial WWI soldiers, and the related absences of Indigenous/colonial peoples’ experiences from commemorating events regarding the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI are used to discuss issues of Indigenous methods. These silences and absences have implications for knowledge-production about wars, belonging and national identity.

Overall, this paper illustrates that Indigenous and colonized soldiers’ experiences are often delegitimized as less heroic and less masculine and less patriotic than that of non-Indigenous soldiers.  This has had long-term consequences for what it means to be “Nepali” or “Australian” in the 21st century. By including the experiences of Indigenous and colonial soldiers in narratives of WWI, it is possible to question the practices of memorialization, as well as provide alternative ways of conceptualizing nations, nationalism, and citizenship that draw upon these Subaltern and Indigenous peoples’ experiences.

3) Bree Akesson, Wilfrid Laurier University
Trees, flowers, prisons, flags: Frustration and hope shaping national identity for Palestinian children and families

The Israeli occupation has shaped the lives of Palestinian families for generations. Under occupation, Palestinian children continue to craft identities connected to place, specifically in their relationship with Palestine as a nation-state. Drawing from a qualitative research project using the concept of place as a lens through which to view children’s negotiations with their environments, this paper examines how Palestinian identity is related to marginalization and dislocation from place as a result of the ongoing Israeli occupation. Eighteen interviews were conducted with Palestinian children and their families living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The research used a place-based methodology including collaborative family interviews, mapmaking, and drawing. The data generally reinforced the view that a history of dislocation and marginalization from place due to the longstanding occupation contribute to emotions of frustration and hope which in turn plays a significant role in the national imaginary of families and children and ultimately shape Palestinian national identity, or being Palestinian.