Captive Fathers, Captive Children: Legacies of the War in the Far East (New Directions in Social and Cultural History)

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, the book will address how memory and trauma were 'worked into' the social and cultural lives of individual children, and will explore how the relationship between their inner psychic worlds and subsequent memory practices unfolded against a challenging historical geopolitical background that was shot through with moral ambivalence. Through these means, 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. The result it is a valuable revival of current literature. Enlivened by interview extracts, case study material and ethnographic observations that will blend the theoretical and the empirical, this work is a valuable revival of current literature.

• | Author: Terry Smyth
• | Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• | Publication Date: Nov 03, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 264 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Art
• | ISBN-10: 1350194247
• | ISBN-13: 9781350194243