Homecoming Veterans in Literature and Culture: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

by Niels Boender (Editor)

Overview

From Homer’s Odyssey itself, the return of the veteran to his or her home has been a central trope of the literary canon. Huge bureaucracies and a panoply of global organisations are deeply concerned with facilitating a painless return to stable homes. This book presents ‘homecoming’ as an analytical lens to better understand veterans' return and reintegration after conflict. Home is held to be multidimensional, a concept encapsulating the physical and the social, particularly disrupted by experiences of violence. Homecoming is, therefore, not a mere moment but a process that can unfold over years and decades as old and new bonds of familiarity are forged. Struggles over the home and homecoming are, moreover, endlessly political, bound up in questions of identity and the nation. Looking across times, places, and disciplines, the collection centres both historical and representational approaches to veterancy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032733548
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/27/2025
Series:	Warwick Series in the Humanities
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Niels Boender is a United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in late-and post-colonial East African political and intellectual history. He has published on the legacies of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, most recently published in the Journal of Social History.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Foreword

Preface

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

 

Introduction

NIELS BOENDER

 

Part I  

Spectacles of Homecoming

 

1          Hometown Heroes of the British Empire: English Canada’s Homecomings of the Great War, 1915-19

            ERIC STORY

 

2          Auf Wiedersehen, Soldat: Does a Soldier Ever Truly Return Home?

            KIRSTEN E. KUMPF BAELE

 

Part II 

Emotions and Homecoming

 

3          ‘Strangers at Home’: Stalag Luft III’s Kriegies Return

            KRISTEN ALEXANDER

 

4          (Re)Making Home After Civil War: Exploring Former Child Soldiers’ Reinsertion Imageries in the DRC

            PAULINE ZERLA

 

5          The Shattered Home: Exploring the Consequences of Unresolved Conflicts on the Concept of Home in Kashmiri Secessionist Movements

            SHIPRA SHUKLA

 

PART III

Conflicted Homecomings

 

6          When the Post-War Isn’t Permanent: Coming Home in the Age of Britain’s ‘Small Wars’

            TAYLOR SOJA

 

7          ‘Walking on the Ground Hurts—Like Walking on a Burn:/ On the Burned Aching Carcass of the World’ or: Where Is a Veteran at Home?

            ELAZAR ELHANAN

 

8          ‘Have you forgotten that I am one of you?’ Mau Mau Homecomings in Late and Post-Colonial Kenya

            NIELS BOENDER

 

9          Invisible Soldiers, Impossible War: Veterans of the Algerian War of Independence Return to France

          Anndal NARAYANAN

 

Index