Taking the First World War as an originary moment of global conflict, the chapter examines how a postcolonial approach opens up war studies in terms of perspective and methodology while asking, at the same time, how a focus on warfare puts pressure on the abstractions of postcolonial theory. What do terms such as ‘war archive’ and the ‘literary’ mean in a context where the majority of the world’s combatants and non-combatants were, till recently, largely non-literate? How does the experience of colonialism trouble the very distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in global histories and what is the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial critique? Is diversity the first step towards decolonisation? The chapter engages with these issues through a focus on the colonial dimensions of the First World War. Combining a reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ with readings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Rudyard Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and David Diop, it argues that a postcolonial approach goes far beyond challenging the colour of memory or Eurocentric assumptions into deconstructing the ideology of war itself.

This chapter examines the myriad ways that authors subverted the post-bellum slavery narrative - employing, variously, Marxist ideas, pan-Africanism and non-racially motivated anti-imperialist rhetoric. It shows that the rhetorical processes through which slaves and slave owners had been othered were challenged and an alternative vision of anti-slavery was offered.

The Epilogue explores the legacies of the state campaigns and shows that the New Family never succeeded in capturing Cubans’ lives and labor. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the Revolution’s official narrative has omitted many of the early campaigns to regulate the Cuban family, specifically women’s labor practices. Yet these silences in the grand narrative reveal how government goals and discourse have transformed over the past sixty years to meet the changing needs of the state. The government explanation for the country’s high rates of abortion and divorce and low rate of official economic productivity is ordinary Cubans’ laziness and lack of commitment to the Revolution. The epilogue argues, on the contrary, that these trends are in fact a direct consequence of government efforts to advance its own version of socialism. Specifically, the very state policies intended to construct the New Family inadvertently contributed to non-nuclear family forms and labor practices. Ordinary Cubans have responded to the discourse of the state with counter-narratives, which frame their non-normative actions as noble and legitimate. Laboring for the State, then, provides evidence of the historical continuity of Cubans’ exercises in autonomy and resistance to the government and its grand narrative.