Keep Calm and Carry On: A Re-Sounding Message

Dr Bex Lewis

The Second World War, Popular Culture and Cultural Memory 13th July 2011

http://ww2poster.co.uk

http://www.keepcalmhome.com/about.htm http://vimeo.com/20597825

Simon Edge, ‘Sign of the Times’, Daily Express, Thursday March 19, 2009, p36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_And_Carry_On

Ministry of Information

• Central governmental publicity machine

• Formed September 1939

• Tell the citizen ‘clearly and swiftly what he is to do, where he is to do it, how he is to do it and what he should not do’.

Total War

During the war, a ‘shared sense of national identity had to be mobilised amongst the people of Britain’. Achieved partly through propaganda posters, more and more people ‘were encouraged to identify themselves as active citizens, as active members of the nation’, a citizenship ‘to be earned by communal and individual service of one’s nation in wartime’.

PhD thesis (2004), quoting Noakes, L., War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-91, 1998, p.48.

Benedict Anderson ‘Imagined Communities’

what ‘makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name’

http://tinyurl.com/imaginedcommunities

1939?21st century?

Royal Wedding 2011

Britishness…

What can you buy?

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150159936105685.293432.180104880684

IWM

IWM (Postcards for sale)

The poster that started it all…

Celebrity

Global

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOB-consumed-t.html?ref=magazine

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/

http://twitter.com/#!/MrsSewAndSew

http://ww2poster.co.uk/2009/07/fougasse-cyril-kenneth-bird-b-1887-d-1965/

http://www.newhomefront.org

Thank you for your time…

QUESTIONS?