ABSTRACT
The War Graves Commission’s desire to project a supranational, Anglophone identity in its commemoration of World War 1 paradoxically helped construct the identities of nations like Canada, South Africa and Australia. Despite the Imperial War Graves Commission’s reservations, each of these Dominions erected their own monument on sites they deemed especially resonant. While these projects served the same basic political need and followed the same architectural program, they differed in size, design character and iconography, a reflection of each Dominion’s relations with Britain during the war, where and when the memorial was built, and how each nation collectively remembered the war in subsequent decades. Today, the events that gave rise to these ‘memory places’ have passed out of living memory, and many who visit them do not come from the nations whose identities they nominally project. As a result, geo-aesthetic meanings rooted in representation, interpretation and memory are giving way to meanings based in processes, practices and becoming. “Retentions from the past and protensions for the future” embedded in these memorials at the time of construction intersect with contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, encouraging the heterogeneous play of temporal orientations, and creating an affective ecology unlike that found in other IWGC sites.
