The Cultural Impact of the Falklands War: A Maritime Perspective (original) (raw)
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Remembering the Falklands War: Present Representations of British National Identity.
This Masters degree dissertation seeks to ascertain present representations of British national identity during the 1982 Falklands War. It does so through the use of small focus groups and their comparison with other primary sources including archival diaries and media accounts. It finds that there is a positive popular memory of the British in the conflict rooted in the legitimacy of British action, the political triumph of the event, and the re-emergence of historically evident British traits. Ultimately this popular memory is heavily shaped by a number of processes including broader social dynamics and, in particular, the political and cultural context of the present.
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2021
The remembrance of war and commemoration practices shape the collective memories of society and, as such, war has been one of the most productive topics in memory studies. Commemorating past wars is one of the ways of constructing a commonly shared memory that would enhance group cohesion and shape collective identity. This paper will provide three examples of sites of memory in reference to the Malvinas/Falklands War, one from each side of the dispute— United Kingdom, Argentina and a third example from the actual territory of the Falkland Islands to illustrate how war memorials are an expression of patriotism, built to frame the deaths in terms of a national narrative of glorious sacrifice for cause and nation. Therefore, war commemoration recalls past experiences of suffering, but at the same time, of resistance.
The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict: A Reader
The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict: A Reader, 2022
The Falklands-Malvinas War of 1982 ended hundreds of British and Argentine lives on the Islands, many of them very young, and definitively contributed to the later deaths of many ex-combatants. It ruined or adversely affected the lives of many thousands more survivors and military relatives. It put a stop to the patient diplomacy which had preceded it, and resoundingly consolidated the popular appeal of the UK Thatcher government, thus helping to ensure the dominance of right-wing Conservative administrations in the UK for another fifteen years. In Argentina, it contributed to the downfall of a terroristic dictatorship and gave the country a chance to follow a less frightening democratic path. It galvanized more serious and concerted efforts to address the problems of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and led to the creation of new model networks for veteran peer support. Neither side really won anything concrete by means of it, although the residents of the Islands themselves undoubtedly gained in military security, financial subsidy and political attention. Otherwise it is largely a sad tale of loss, grief, suffering and waste. This Reader selects, forty years after the War, some of the most vital writing about it. It tends, without partisanship, towards evaluating the War in moral and political, humane and socially consequential terms, of the kind with which military historians and short-term-perspective politicians tend not to concern themselves. It likewise inclines towards remembering the War as an event in which identifiable individuals, or their friends and comrades, suffered and died, rather than simply viewing these many participants as anonymous pawns on a geopolitical chess board. While providing general factual commentary and discussion on the causes, events, consequences of and continuing debate about the War, it additionally gives considerable space to accounts of what it was like, experientially, to have been a combatant on either side in the conflict. It also takes into consideration the ways in which the War has been mediated in news, literature, film and television. The anthology therefore represents the variety of discourses to be found in the existing archive of writing about the dispute, encompassing diplomatic communications, historical accounts, personal memoirs, impassioned polemics and academic analyses originating in various disciplines.
The Falklands War and the media: popular and elite understandings of the conflict
2016
This dissertation aims to illustrate that certain narratives of the Falklands War were the products of a failure to account for a public that think in ways that cannot be classified in to simple categories. It will argue that the Falklands War remains an area of contested history within British discourse, not everyone understood the conflict as the noble crusade that Thatcher and newspapers such as the Sun thought it was. It will look at how the presentation of the conflict shaped public perception and vice versa, how perception of public opinion shaped presentation. It will counter the view that the public are easily manipulated, rather people are free-thinking individuals. It will illustrate how relationships between the public, the military, the government and the media interacted to develop certain understandings of the conflict. Finally it will assess how the variety of different narratives have manifested themselves in later representations of the conflict. It will ask what im...
No Man is an Island: Reflections on the Battlefield Landscapes of the Falklands-Malvinas War
International Journal of Military History and Historiography
There were two sets of Falkland Islands fought over in 1982. To the British, including the islanders, they were of course the Falklands, but to the Argentines they were the Malvinas. Some in the British military thought the islands were off the coast of Scotland when they first heard of them, in most cases just before deployment. By way of contrast, Argentine troops had grown up believing they were part of their birth right stolen from them by British ‘pirates’. But how did troops on the ground view the islands when they were up close and personal with them, when the islands formed the battlefields over which they fought? During the Falklands-Malvinas War the surface of the land was bombed, it was shelled, it was picked apart and dug into to create fortifications, minefields and graves, and in places it still carries those scars. Drawing on the experience of four visits since 2012, eyewitness accounts and memoirs, military records and archaeological remains, this article explores th...
Revisiting the Past, Narrating War Memories: Retelling the Falklands War in A Soldier’s Song
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2021
Private Ken Lukowiak was a member of the Second Battalion Parachute Regiment (2 PARA) of the British Army deployed to the Falkland Islands for the 1982 British-Argentine conflict. The veteran’s creative drive motivated him into writing down his memories, and writing helped him overcome his war traumas. This paper seeks to explore Lukowiak’s memoir as a work offering an alternative retelling of the Falklands War, based on a deep emotional framework, in contrast to the narrative of heroism favoured by mass media. His personal account emphasizes the psychological distress and detachment of a soldier in opposition to the supposedly exemplary and outstanding behaviour of troops as often portrayed in mainstream journalism during and after the armed conflict.
The Falkland/Malvinas dispute: a contemporary battle between history and memory
Global Discourse, 2013
In a state of culturally induced amnesia for empire in the post-war period, British public or lay collective memory of the Falkland Islands arguably began in April 1982 when Argentine forces landed on the islands. Since then, a memory of the islands has emerged from the conflict that is in contrast to the detailed and very complex history of the territory and the catalogue of associated legal interventions, UN resolutions and bi (tri)-partite negotiations that have taken place over decades. Although among political elites in Britain there is a sense that there is no further case to answer, the Falkland/ Malvinas dispute, nonetheless, continues as a battle between history and memory. This paper discusses the nature of collective memory and explains the Britain’s collective response in 1982 in terms of a set of deeply embedded cultural psychodynamics that led to specific re-enactments of the past.
Revisiting the Falklands-Malvinas Question. Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
University of London Press, 2021
Forty years after the Falklands War, the causes and consequences of the military conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 still reverberate. The archipelago that makes up the Falkland-Malvinas Islands is surrounded by complexities and antagonisms—including controversy around its very name. This book interrogates the conflict with approaches from history, political science, sociology, film, and cultural studies. Additionally, this collection brings together English, Spanish, and Argentine specialists and researchers. It includes testimony from war veterans and exiles, essays on the films of Julio Cardoso, and Argentine patriotism as witnessed in contemporary literature and pedagogy. By taking up these different perspectives, Revisiting the Falklands-Malvinas Question moves beyond traditional approaches to the conflict based on nationalism, geopolitics, or military achievements, leading to a more expansive discussion.
The Cultural Representation of Falklands War on British Television
Journal of International Social Research, 2019
Although the Falklands War was one of the shortest conflicts in the world's history; it had extensive effects on the British society and culture which is still controversial in some ways. Particularly, the cultural impacts were much more substantial. Furthermore, in conjunction with the opportunities of technology, apart from the other wars in the past, television brought the reality of the war to homes and people's lives. There is also little doubt that Margaret Thatcher was in favour of using television's power in order to influence the public in some ways whose reputation and confidence were boosted with the success in the Falklands War. This research will attempt to assess the television as an illusion or a tool in order to determine these cultural and remarkable effects to the whole of the society as well as the people. Furthermore, the study will focus on the language of transcription from the television to the people seem to be the most essential tool to inspire the society. Besides, there is little doubt that framing the Falklands War on the television offered the opportunity to show war's effects on society and the culture of the British people.