Introduction

The Introduction provides a historical and theoretical background to the analyses presented in the following chapters. It refers to the recent imperial and global turns in First World War studies to discuss the entanglements of race, racism and imperial knowledges during the first global conflict. At the same time it demonstrates that the 2014–2018 centenary commemorations in France and the United Kingdom showed a reluctance to engage with race and empire. It defines such terms as coloniality, decoloniality and the death ethic of war, referring to the works of Walter D. Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres in particular, and discusses the different approaches to postcolonial theory in French and British academia. Branach-Kallas argues that the five novels analysed in the book challenge and complement the metanarratives of the First World War, offering a rigorous interrogation of the structures of colonial dominance underlying the French, British and German imperial projects. The following chapters, as the author avers, ask important questions about the decolonization of the memory of the First World War, its tools, critical potential and limitations.