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Chapter 5 focuses on how the War on Terror’s permutations of Latina/o war literature, theater, television, film, and popular music present methodological and political challenges to conventional understandings of Latina/o relationships to power as inherently oppositional to capitalism and US imperialism. These relatively new genres include Latina/o War on Terror combat action memoir and related oral histories; wounded warrior narratives; protofascist Special Forces Über-warrior memoir and biographical profiles; Conscientious Objector testimonio, ideologically ambivalent wartime theater, and pacifist performance art; military command memoirs by junior and senior officers; as well as Latina/o spy memoir, biography, and historical fiction. Despite the authors’ profound differences in cultural heritage, experiences, and aesthetic capacities, their cultural productions cohere around intersecting, and diverging, violence-based theories of knowledge and being that extend through, but also far beyond warfare and wartime contexts. They also demonstrate the stark right-wing turn in a large segment of contemporary Latina/o life writing, which accentuates the wide range of ideological trajectories identified in earlier chapters.

This chapter covers opposition to war in a range of children’s publications in the years between the two world wars. It shows how opposition spanned all social classes, but was particularly solid in Socialist publications for the young. It also explores disruptions to pacifism caused by the rise of fascism, particularly as the civil war in Spain came to a head. Works discussed include those by H.G. Wells and Helen Zenna Smith (pen-name of Evadne Price), as well as the Biggles books. Finally, it looks at the rise of youth culture, and the unusual case of public school boys led by Giles and Esmond Romilly (nephews of Winston Churchill studying at Wellington) who produced and distributed four numbers of Out of Bounds, an underground magazine dedicated to opposing fascism.

This chapter explores British televisual representations of transgression in the First World War from the 1960s to the centenary period (2014-18). It examines the ways in which the television medium has mediated public discourse about the historical and historiographical meanings of war and identity during and after the conflict of 1914-18 by focusing on the ways in which figures of transgression such as mutineers, conscientious objectors, and deserters have been used to subvert normative narratives of the Great War. The chapter considers how the deployment of historical transgression has enabled critical reflections of contemporary political and social discourses. It demonstrates how and why the intersection of the commemorative impulse in televisual representations of war encourages reflection on and negotiation of positions within and outside of more reassuring cultural narratives about the conflict, within institutional and governmental contexts for production and reception, and how they have shifted over time. This chapter concludes that such figures provide uncomfortable counter-narratives but that these are ultimately deployed to reinforce dominant ideas about the conflict.