ABSTRACT
Chapter One introduces the literature on national memory, framing the imperial dimensions of the First World War as a case of a difficult, contested memory. It outlines the history of the First World War as it pertained to Islam and Muslims, emphasising those aspects of history that are erased in the dominant narrative of the conflict as a European civil war. It also demonstrates how this history foreshadowed the racialisation of Muslims over the following century. In pursuit of counternarratives, the chapter introduces the eleven local sites of memory that compose the case studies. Finally, it presents the book's argument: that the centenary unsettled national memory; that during the centenary, postcolonial melancholia destabilised the nation at large; and that deliberately disruptive narratives (termed “cultivated melancholia”) emerge under particular conditions.
