Every large nation in the world was directly or indirectly affected by the impact of war during the course of the twentieth century, and while the historical narratives of war of these nations are well known, far less is understood about how small islands coped. These islands – often not nations in their own right but small outposts of other kingdoms, countries, and nations – have been relegated to mere footnotes in history and heritage studies as interesting case studies or unimportant curiosities. Yet for many of these small islands, war had an enduring impact on their history, memory, intangible heritage and future cultural practices, leaving a legacy that demanded some form of local response. This is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to what the memories, legacies and heritage of war in small islands can teach those who live outside them, through closely related historical and contemporary case studies covering 20th and 21st century conflict across the globe.
The volume investigates a number of important questions: Why and how is war memory so enduring in small islands? Do factors such as population size, island size, isolation or geography have any impact? Do close ties of kinship and group identity enable collective memories to shape identity and its resulting war-related heritage? This book contributes to heritage and memory studies and to conflict and historical archaeology by providing a globally wide-ranging comparative assessment of small islands and their experiences of war. Heritage of War in Small Island Territories is of relevance to students, researchers, heritage and tourism professionals, local governments, and NGOs.
Table of Contents:
CONTENTS
Introduction: Islands of War, Islands of Memory
Gilly Carr and Keir Reeves
Chapter 1: Islands, intimate and public memories of the Pacific War in Fiji
Jacqueline Leckie
Chapter 2: Fragmented memories: the Dodecanese Islands during WWII
Hazal Papuccular
Chapter 3: From poetic anamnesis to political commemoration: grassroots and institutional memories of the Greek Civil War on an Aegean Island
Elena Mamoulaki
Chapter 4: Islands of war, guardians of memory: the afterlife of the German Occupation in the British Channel Islands
Gilly Carr
Chapter 5: Turncoat heroes or reckless egotists? The ambivalent memorialization of the ‘Russian War’ on the Dutch Island of Texel
Rob van Ginkel
Chapter 6: The HMS Royal Oak and the ‘Ownership of Tragedy’ in Orkney
Daniel Travers
Chapter 7: "Tingbaot Wol Wo II Long Pasifik Aelan": managing memories of WWII heritage in the Pacific
Keir Reeves and Joseph Cheer
Chapter 8: Malta G.C.: war memories and cultural narratives of a Mediterranean island
Sandro Debono
Chapter 9: Scraps of memory: Pacific War tourism on Efate Island (Vanuatu)
Lamont Lindstrom
Chapter 10: Islands of no return: memory, materiality and the Falklands War
Tony Pollard
Chapter 11: The coastwatcher mythos: the politics and poetics of Solomon Islands war memory
Geoffrey White
Chapter 12: The sacred and the profane: souvenir and collecting behaviours on the WWII battlefields of Peleliu Island, Palau, Micronesia
Neil Price, Rick Knecht and Gavin Lindsay
Chapter 13: War remnants of the Greek archipelago: persistent memories or fragile heritage?
Nota Pantzou
Chapter 14: Post war legacies in the island of Kythera: oblivion versus historical memory
Irene Lagani
Chapter 15: Crete: visual memories of war
Maria Kagiadaki
Chapter 16: Remembering war and occupation in post-independence Timor-Leste
Michael Leach
About the Author :
Gilly Carr is a Senior Lecturer and Academic Director in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education, UK. She is also a Fellow and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology at St. Catharine’s College, UK. She is author of Legacies of Occupation: Archaeology, Heritage and Memory in the Channel Islands (2014) and co-editor (with Harold Mytum) of Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire (Routledge, 2012).
Keir Reeves is Professor and Chair in Regional Engagement at Federation University, Australia. In 2013 he was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a visiting researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, UK where he worked with the Heritage Research Group in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. Keir is co-editor (with Bill Logan) of Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’ (Routledge, 2009).
Review :
"This volume highlights the complexity and variety of war memory experienced and perpetuated in island communities across the world. Memories can be complex and include those of combatant and imprisoned aliens, allies, or indigenous island peoples, all with their own perspectives further distilled by the telling and re-telling of their experiences, and analyzed here by an international array of scholars." – Harold Mytum, University of Liverpool, UK
"This collection of essays addresses an overlooked aspect of war histories and the relations between centre and periphery in Colonial and Imperial histories. Authors attend to the silences and untold incidents in overlooked small islands and territories that slip through the gap in big histories of nations. This book is important theoretically and empirically, and will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars of war, memory, heritage and identity." – Max Quanchi, University of South Pacific, Fiji
