This is a book written with clarity and erudition that provides original insights into the intersections of war, the military, subjectivity and identity in relation to memory. So often these terms within memory studies are used superficially, but Sarah Maltby’s work tackles these in ways that reveals a much deeper understanding of the complex processes of remembering. The work addresses the difficult area of those who are the subject of media coverage of traumatic events as well as those who are denied presence. In this way the book casts new light on the question of agency in relation to remembering. The book also makes a new and valuable contribution to memory methodologies, especially into the relationships between ethnography and remembering. A rich and significant study of the media as agents of social memory in the context of difficult pasts.
Professor Anna Reading, Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries. Kings College, University of London.
The accomplished writer Sarah Maltby takes us back to the half forgotten hinterland of risky military adventurism in the South Atlantic to ask of some of its actors the meaning in the media of the 30th anniversary of the Falklands conflict. As a participant observer with the islanders, press and the military this strikingly original study brings a rare immediacy to how the media performs and the uses to which it is put in the crafting of national meaning and memory.
Professor Jim Aulich, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Maltby contributes an innovative, multi-faceted and thoughtful memory framework to a highly mediated war (its representation and commemoration) without losing sight of the memories of ‘the person’ (including the author herself) as an important inheritor of mediated memories. It is this intersection of the different scales of remembering (institutional, national, communal, medial and human) that offers the reader a complex account of how memories become mobilised in powerful ways in the present.
Dr Joanne Garde-Hansen, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK
In Remembering the Falklands War: Media, Memory and Identity, Sarah Maltby highlights how the carefully managed media treatment of the 30th anniversary commemorations of the Falklands Conflict rested on an array of subtle and not so subtle acts of strategic amnesia that crucially downplayed the fighting. The resulting remembrances became key sites where military personnel, the media and the Falkland Islanders negotiated the conflicting identities which arose from their status as both agents and objects of media coverage, and more broadly where the nation’s engagement in differing conflicts and the adequacy of the support it offered its troops could be explored and appraised. Her insightful analysis of how the Falklands commemoration was staged in, with and through the media and how the carefully crafted ‘memories’ it rested on were deployed to manage current imperatives in Anglo-Latin American relations, adds an important dimension to our collective understanding of a conflict whose profound political and cultural significance comes more and more into focus as the events themselves fade into the historical distance.
Associate Professor Kevin Foster, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Australia
War commemorations always tell us more about the present than the past. Sarah Maltby’s brilliant study of the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war reveals the complex negotiations and conflicts involved in remembering with, in and through the media. The rich detail in this deeply-research book provides a fascinating insight into how collective and institutional identities are imagined and contested, performed and disrupted in practices of remembering.
Professor Philip Hammond, Professor of Media & Communications, London South Bank University, UK
‘Drawing on valuable ethnographic data, Sarah Maltby offers a refined account of how the Falklands War was represented in public forms of remembering at the time of its 30th anniversary. The book provides a sophisticated discussion of the questions of power, agency and identity that arise from convergent and divergent forms of collective memory.’
ProfessorMichael Pickering, Emritus Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis, Loughborough University, UK
Featured Image Above: Argentinian Cemetery, near Goose Green, Falkland Islands. June 2012. © Sarah Maltby
