‘An act of wilful defiance’: Objection, Protest and Rebellion in the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Galleries

Abstract

In spite of its purveyance of British stalwart tropes such as “the Tommies and the Officers”, the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) new First World War Galleries feature stories of conscientious objectors and Irish Republicans, whose resistance to the war transgressed prevailing norms. They also highlight poet/soldier Siegfried Sassoon’s Soldier’s Declaration, a widely-circulated critical letter he intended as “an act of wilful defiance”. However, though these stories are displayed, this chapter argues that both the curatorial apparatus surrounding them (e.g. texts, objects), and the IWM’s historicizing of the past by claiming to present the events as they unfolded at that time subsume transgression in normative orders. This chapter contextualizes close readings of these three portrayals of transgression within broader Museum and Memory Studies discourses. It also situates the IWM’s narratives of mythic togetherness and tacit imperialism as an expression of what Paul Gilroy has defined as “postcolonial melancholia” as it is found in wider conceptions of British identity throughout the WWI Centenary commemorations – a period that loosely corresponded with the Brexit campaign and its consequences.