Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings in Writings of Conflict 1800–1918

Description

Propaganda others the enemy as brutish, brutal, and lacking in humanity. By contrast, a wealth of literary and first-hand writings present switches in which the enemy becomes, as Wilfred Owen famously put it, a ‘strange friend’. This book focuses on moments of intimacy and reassessment between military enemies—truces, treatment of the wounded, relationships with prisoners of war. It is concerned with the work done by declarations of fellow feeling, both to challenge and enable militarism. The book explores enemy intimacies in literature, philosophy, and life writings to ask questions pressing for our contemporary moment about the nature of amity, enmity, familiarity, and otherness. It ranges across British conflicts of the long nineteenth century, a period in which ideas about the uniqueness of combat experience coalesced with a European effort to secure a distinctive version of so-called civilised humanity. The sense that soldiers of the other side, bonded by experiences unavailable to civilians, were ‘just like us’ came into tension with views about the alterity of other nations and races. This book considers which enemies can become familiar and which are held as other, investigating dividing lines of nation, race, religion, and culture. Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings asks how far these affectively powerful encounters can shift individual and wider narratives about civilisation and humanitarianism. This book uncovers a rich cultural history of enemy intimacies to consider different orientations of cosmopolitanism and humanitarian fellow feeling, while recognising and explaining the ways in which full international kinship remains elusive. Cover Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings in Writings of Conflict 1800–1918 Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Contents Introduction ‘Sealing their sameness’: Fellow Feeling and Its Limits ‘Queer mechanics’: Approaching Enemy Intimacies 1: ‘Strange friends’: The Poetics of Fellow Feeling On Loving Your Enemy ‘Sealing their sameness as earth’s sojourners’: Owen, Hardy, and Cosmopolitanism Combat Gnosticism and the Compassionate Soldier: Owen and O’Brien Coda: ‘Let us [not] sleep now’: Owen, Britten, Jarman, and Queer Care 2: An Emotional History of Truces: Feeling with/for the Enemy at Mafeking and Reimagining Christmas 1914 ‘Our one day of peace and rest’: Perceptions of the Enemy Shaped by Sunday Culture at Mafeking ‘200 days, not out’: Shared Colonial Culture ‘Men are killed’: Shared Precarity ‘A funny kind of warfare’: Truces and the Uncanny All Together Now? Truce Exclusions and Legacies 3: Treating the Enemy: Humanitarian War? Dr Thomson: Celebrating Humanitarian Heroism in the Crimean War ‘Faces to haunt one in sleep’: War with Wounding in View ‘The Usages of Civilised War’: Humanitarianism Nationalised ‘Tutti Fratelli’: Are All Men Brothers? After Omdurman: British Imperial Violence and Grievability Contact Zones: Reassessments of Civilization and Brutality 4: ‘Not the face of an enemy’: Prisoners of War, Captor Shame, and Transformative Feeling Captor Shame: Reorienting the Emotional History of Capture Contingent Compassion and Withholding: Tolstoy and Levinas (or Karatayev’s Dog and Bobby) Conditions of Compassion: Youth, Age, and Domestic Sympathies Postscript Transformation: ‘One forgets that they are the enemy’ 5: Enemy Exchanges: Gifts, Spoils, and Revaluation Presents and Plunder: The Materiality of Power Relations Hospitality/Hostpitality: Sustenance, Obligation, and Exclusion (Inter)personal Objects Coda Two Souvenir Photographs Epilogue: Loving the Enemy: Forms of Reconciliation Bibliography 1. Unpublished Material Newspapers and 2. Periodicals 3. Websites 4. Other media 5. Books and Articles Index