This course breaks free from the traditional mould into which war studies have been cast until recently by focussing on the home front rather than the battlefront and by engaging with circumstances created by war that men and women negotiated with. Through the reading of WWII as global war rather than ‘total war’ the course will go beyond respective national contexts to study the universal transformative impact of war on society, the family and gender relations. The purpose is to examine how cultural discourses of the ruling elite on good citizenship, soldierly virtues and war wives were received, interpreted, appropriated or subverted by the ‘many’. Selected examples of encounters between the POWs and German women, the GIs and British women, Asian soldiers and British nurses, British soldiers and Anglo-Indian entertainment girls, Black GIs and poor prostitutes in colonial India will be chosen to arrive at an understanding of global history as one of transfers and entanglements. |
