This article considers the context of the Silence's supposed origin: Cape Town, May -December 1918. Drawing on recent studies on war and sound history, it considers the Silence's socio-cultural and affective dimensions, examining the collective statements and values embedded in the discourses about it, its urban staging and co-operative performance, and the instability of its meaning. The Silence was popular in Cape Town, with thousands of Capetonians observing the practice. Yet, the diversity of responses to the war in the city meant that those who participated in the Silence were not necessarily representative of the city as a whole. The plurality of responses to the war in Cape Town meant that the Silence was only ever a partial reflection of the city. Nevertheless, it serves an example of the importance of sound to defining and encouraging local and trans-Empire ideas of community and commemoration in the wartime, urban context.
is a researcher working on unceded Wurundjeri land, including at the University of Melbourne where she received her PhD in 2018 and was a Gilbert Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019. She researches the persistence of British imperial culture through studying contentious landscapes, buildings, and bodies, with current work drawing on autoethnographies of energy-limiting disability to explore contemporary historical consciousness. Her monograph Milton Keynes in British Culture: Imagining England was published by Routledge in 2019.
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