Tidy, J, (2015) Forces Sauces and Eggs for Soldiers: food, nostalgia, and the rehabilitation of the British military. Critical Military Studies, 1 (3). pp. 220-232. ISSN 2333-7486
Abstract
This article identifies, and considers the political implications of, the association of the contemporary British military and British soldiers with nostalgia. This aspect of the discursive project of rehabilitating the British military post-Iraq has not hitherto been theorized. The article analyses a set of exemplifying texts, four military charity food brands (Eggs for Soldiers, Forces Sauces, Red Lion Foods, and Rare Tea Company Battle of Britain Tea) to ask how nostalgic rehabilitation of the British military unfolds at the intersections of militarization, commemoration, and post-2008 “conscience capitalism”. I outline how military charity food brands are a form of “conscience capitalism” through which the perpetuation of militarized logics are produced as a notionally apolitical social “cause”, rendered intelligible within the terms of existing commoditized discourses of post-2008 vintage nostalgia. I then ask what understandings of British soldiers and the British military are constituted within the discourse of nostalgic rehabilitation, and secondly what forms of commemoration are entailed. I argue that a nostalgic generalization of soldiers and the military nullifies the potential unruliness of individual soldiers and obscures the specifics of recent, controversial, wars. Secondly nostalgic civil–military engagement entails a commemorative logic in which forms of quasi-military service are brought into the most banal spaces of everyday civilian life.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2015 Taylor & Francis. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Critical Military Studies. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | military charities; nostalgia; militarization; Help For Heroes; conscience capitalism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 09 Sep 2016 14:38 |
Last Modified: | 14 Apr 2017 12:48 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2015.1011439 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/23337486.2015.1011439 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:104408 |