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Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Introduction
Chapter 1: Life in Captivity
Chapter 2: Bringing War into the Home
Chapter 3: Remembering and Commemorating
Chapter 4: Finding Meaning in Memories
Chapter 5: Home as a Place for Remembrance
Chapter 6: The Search for Military Family Histories
Chapter 7: Place and Pilgrimage
Conclusion
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Dr. Terry Smyth is a Community Fellow at the University of Essex, UK. He has worked in the health and education sectors and has published extensively on memory and trauma.
Zusammenfassung
Why are the daughters and sons of Far East prisoners of war still captivated by the stories of their fathers? What is it that compels so many of the children, after so many years, to search for the details of their fathers' captivity? And how, over the decades, have they come to terms with their childhood memories? In his book Terry Smyth treads new ground by examining the processes through which the children's memory practices came to be rooted in the POW experiences of their fathers.
By following a life course approach, and a psychosocial methodology, the book demonstrates how memory and trauma were 'worked into' the social and cultural lives of individual children, and explores how the relationship between their inner psychic worlds and subsequent memory practices unfolded against a challenging and morally ambivalent geopolitical background.
The book invites readers to engage with the author in a journey of exploration and self-reflection, with elements of auto-ethnography adding richness to the text. Enlivened by interview extracts, case study material and ethnographic observations, this work opens up fresh and ambitious perspectives on the personal legacies of war.
Vorwort
The book examines how the children of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) remembered their childhoods and how, through different forms of memory practice, they were able to revisit the relationships with their fathers.
Zusatztext
Captive Fathers, Captive Children is an extraordinary book. On the one hand it is a deeply researched and poignant account of the return and home lives of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOWS), seen through the eyes of their children, of whom Terry is one. On the other, it investigates the historical pursuits of FEPOW children and why they are drawn to reconstruct the traumatic pasts of their fathers. It is at once a memoir, a social history of POWs, an ethnography of commemoration and an exploration of the subjectivity of descendants.
