Full Description
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that "America" is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans.
Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Paradoxical In/visibility of War
John Louis Lucaites and Jon Simons
Part I: Seeing War
Chapter 1: How Photojournalism Has Framed the War in Afghanistan
David Campbell
Chapter 2: Returning Soldiers and the In/visibility of Combat Trauma
Christopher J. Gilbert and John Louis Lucaites
Chapter 3: (Re)fashioning PTSD's Warrior Project
Jeremy G. Gordon
Chapter 4: Unremarkable Suffering: Banality, Spectatorship, and War's In/visibilities
Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol
Transition
"War Is Fun," a Photo-Essay
Nina Berman
Chapter 5: Laying bin Laden to Rest: A Case Study of Terrorism and the Politics of Visibility
Jody Madeira
Part II: Not Seeing War
Chapter 6: Digital War and the Public Mind: Call of Duty Reloaded, Decoded
Roger Stahl
Chapter 7: A Cinema of Consolation: Post-9/11 Super Invasion Fantasy
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Chapter 8: Differential Configurations: In/visibility through the Lens of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008)
Claudia Breger
Chapter 9: Canine Rescue, Civilian Casualties, and the Long Gulf War
Purnima Bose
Part III: Theorizing the In/visibility of War
Chapter 10: The In/visibility of Liberal Peace: Perpetual Peace and Enduring Freedom
Jon Simons
Chapter 11: Why War? Baudrillard, Derrida, and the Absolute Televisual Image
Diane Rubenstein
Chapter 12: War in the Twenty-first Century: Visible, Invisible, or Superpositional?
James Der Derian
Notes on Contributors
Photo Credits
Index
