Full Description
What do we see when we look at a battlefield? How do we come to understand environments as battlefields in the first place? What happens to our perception of war when we focus on the physical spaces of conflict? Warscapes is the first collection to pursue answers to such questions by considering the relationship between war, environment, and media along three lines: imagined geographies of control that prefigure environments as spaces of war; representations of resistance to occupation and ecocidal violence; and elemental reframings of archives and cultural memories of war. This book offers novel perspectives on historical conflict environments while also examining how hypothetical spaces of conflict are imagined. Deploying theoretical perspectives gleaned from film and media studies, ecocriticism, environmental history, urban studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies, among others, authors highlight an international spectrum of 21st-century fiction films and television series, documentaries, and video installations that challenge how we look at war.
Contents
Introduction: Situational Awareness: Orienting the Study of War, Environment, and Media
Cortland Rankin and Brady Fletcher
Part I: Area of Operations: Mapping Militarized Geographies
Chapter 1: Exposed Façades: Documentary Constructions of Urban Training Centers as Countergeographies of American Military Urbanism
Cortland Rankin
Chapter 2: Neocolonial Warscapes: The Militarized Jungles of Twenty-First-Century Action-Adventure Cinema
Tatiana Konrad
Chapter 3: "Man's Determined Assault on the Secrets of Space": Thinking Militarized Astronautics and Extraterrestrial Environmentality with For All Mankind
Brady Fletcher
Part II: War-Torn: Occupation, Resistance, and Environmental Violence
Chapter 4: Night Raiders: Indigenous Cinema Illuminates Colonial-Capitalist Warfare
Cynthia Baron
Chapter 5: Ecocide in Ukraine: Environmental Violence and War in Valentyn Vasyanovych's Atlantis
Haley Laurila
Chapter 6: Pan, Tilt, Zoom: Witnessing the Occupation of East Jerusalem in The Neighbour Before the House
Hugo Ljungbäck
Part III: Aftermath: Reframing the Memory of War Through Elemental Media
Chapter 7: The Dust of War: Rethinking the Global War on Terror's Iconic Dust
Renée Pastel
Chapter 8: How to Look at Ice: The Ice Road in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Visual Canon of the Leningrad Siege
Natalija Arlauskaitė
Chapter 9: Changes of State: Water as Medium and the Fog of War in John Akomfrah's Mimesis: African Soldier
Lawrence Alexander
Conclusion: Special Reconnaissance Operations: How to Look for Warscapes
Cortland Rankin and Brady Fletcher
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index
