'We will meet again': Mobilising prosthetic memories of the Second World War during the UK Covid-19 Lockdown

Mahoney, C ORCID: 0000-0002-5495-0031 (2021) 'We will meet again': Mobilising prosthetic memories of the Second World War during the UK Covid-19 Lockdown. In: Covid-19, the Second World War, and the Idea of Britishness. Peter Lang, pp. 247-269. ISBN 9781789979794

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Abstract

This chapter considers the ways in which institutions such as the British media, monarchy and the British government have sought to establish a sense of continuity with the Second World War during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because the majority of those addressed by this discourse have no personal recollection of the Second World War, any parallels are discursively drawn with a version of the war that exists only in Britain's cultural imaginary. Participatory commemorative events such as VE Day 75 and the weekly 'Clap for Carers' were employed as a site of transmission for an 'official' narrative regarding the pandemic and the construction of an idealised British subject that is rooted in conservative imaginings of the Second World War. These processes of commemoration are exclusionary and involve implicit practices of forgetting that exclude divergent minority voices and experiences of both the Second World War and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Item Type:	Book Section
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	19 May 2021 08:28
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 22:46
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3123176