Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration

This chapter examines the gestation of a film/performance multimedia project entitled The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing (2017) that draws on the experiences of Joan Prior, who served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), through war-torn Europe between 1944 and 1946. Working with a personal archive of photographs, letters and handed-down memories, the authors filmed a field trip (a ‘rejourn’) through France and Germany in 2011, this account of which is informed by and contributes to a body of work on war, memory and intermediality by Marianne Hirsch (2012), Michael Rothberg (2009), Rebecca Schneider (2011) and Diana Taylor (2003). It culminates in an account of an interactive installation that models new ways in which family history and personal testimony of war might coalesce into performance of, and as, (manifestations of) commemoration.