Remembering the Falklands War: Media, Memory and Identity
By Sarah Maltby
Sarah Maltby is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the School of Media, Film and Music, Sussex University. Follow Sarah @warandmedia
The Book
Remembering the Falklands War: Media, Memory, Identity offers an empirically informed understanding of how identity and agency become wholly embedded within practices of media-remembering. It draws upon ethnographic data collected from the the British military, the BBC and Falkland Islanders during the 30th Anniversary of the Falklands war to uniquely offer multiple perspectives on a single ‘remembering’ phenomenon.
The book offers an analysis of the convergence, interconnectedness and interdependence of media and remembering, specifically the production, interpretation and negotiation of remembering in the media ecology. Questions regarding who is remembering what and how are at the centre of this analysis. But so so too is the motivation and commitment of those engaged in the act of remembering within the specific temporal and social context of the Anniversary of the Falklands War. Consequently, the book not only examines the role of media in the formation and sustaining of collective memory but also the ways those who are remembered or remember in media texts become implicated in these processes.
Reviews
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. 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.
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’s 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
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.’
Professor Michael Pickering, Emritus Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis, Loughborough University, UK
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Palgrave Macmillan Memory Series
Follow @PalgraveCultMed