War Memorial: the Calling Blighty films and remembrance

The Calling Blighty series of nearly 400 films were messages from servicemen in India and Burma to be shown to families in local cinemas at the end of the Second World War. They are remarkable because of their cinematic quality and the men’s direct address to camera, and the 64 remaining films reveal much about family memories, public remembrance and representation of the Northern voice on screen. Along with Marion Hewitt of the North West Film Archive, the author has been engaged in an ongoing project to find the relatives of the men of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in the films and recreate the screenings. These ritual ceremonies of remembrance have been augmented by a media memorial, a Channel 4 TV documentary about the project and creative critical reflection through an experimental artist’s film, drawing on the archive material. This analysis of the project looks at the relationship of the Blighty films to wartime film and documentary, in particular, as well as soldier self-representation, and their implications for both family and communal remembrance

Subject/ive bodies: the resistance poetics of Chrystos and Mahadai Das

Recent criticism has considered how literary texts harness historical and ideological forces in the representation of the body. However, much of that scholarship focuses on hegemonic structures such as Western medicine, post-human technologies or colonial race theories. This article looks at how two poets from the Americas – Indigenous North American Chrystos (Menominee) and Mahadai Das from Guyana – express representations of the body from a position of marginalisation to emphasise the connections between individual subjectivity and social transformation. I discuss the body as theme for producing a resistance poetry that directly connects desire, disaffection, sexuality and mourning to decolonisation. I perform close readings that emphasise the linkages between intimate relations and social movements. Chrystos and Das speak to a constitutive divide in post-colonial studies between the personal and political in what is called resistance literature. By centring deeply personal perspectives on decolonial struggle within a figurative context that encourages contemplation and complexity, these poets contribute to a diversification of resistance theory that addresses gender, anti-racist, sexual diversity and other movements of the last few decades

The compelling nature of romantic love: A psychosocial perspective

This paper combines psychoanalysis with socio-cultural theory in order to illuminate the vicissitudes of romantic love. Contemporary sociological theory argues that we are witnessing a new discourse of intimacy in popular culture and in everyday narratives of love and relationships. In a postmodern age, the need for or belief in romantic love might seem unreconstructed and naive, but romantic love retains a compelling hold in contemporary culture and psychoanalysis can help to explain why. This paper demonstrates the need for a socio-psychoanalytic analysis of love ideals and love talk via case material from two female interviewees from different generations and it will discuss what romantic love means for them. It will argue that there is a complex interaction between one's psychic and social self, and demonstrate that it is by analysing this dynamic interplay that we can understand why romantic love is desired and deconstructed in one case, but remains decathected and uninterrogated in the other