Making Melancholia: Remembering the Empire and Unsettling the Nation during the First World War Centenary

Between 2014 and 2018, the British state engaged in a large-scale project of memory-making. A budget of £50 million, 2,500 hours of BBC programming, and a wave of new museum exhibitions and monuments accompanied the centenary of the First World War. The goal of revisiting a century-old war was, in David Cameron's words, 'to say something about who we are as a people'. As such, the centenary highlighted some stories, erased others, and created new insiders and outsiders. This talk will trace the dominant narrative of national memory that emerged during the centenary, arguing that it re-centred metropolitan Britain and rewrote empire as multiculturalism. Turning to local memories and counter-memories, I argue that these marginal narratives disrupt national memory by revealing the scale of what has been forgotten--in particular, the violence of an imperial war and its legacies in the present. Amidst the increasing politicisation of history and commemoration, I ask how remembering the past might pave the way for a more critical, less cohesive understanding of the present.