‘From empire to multicultural nation: memory and forgetting during the First World War centenary commemorations’

This keynote explores how questions of national belonging and military service have been addressed over the WW1 centenary period. There is a particular focus on how narratives of front-line heroism, embodied in figures such as Walter Tull, have a tendency to exclude the range of experiences and contributions to the war effort, particularly in an imperial context. The dominance of front-line narratives presents a conditional model of citizenship for contemporary multicultural Britain, overlooks opposition to war and tends to collapse the imperial relationships of 1914 with the present, partially eliding other struggles for national independence and equality.