War culture and the contest of images / Dora Apel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Apel, Dora, 1952-

Series:

New directions in international studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and war.

War and society.

Art and society.

Physical Description:

xii, 273 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2012]

Summary:

War Culture and The Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.

While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I The Romance of War

1 Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post-9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko 17

2 Historical Reenactment: Romantic Amnesia or Counter-Memory? 47

Part II The Body of War

3 Abu Ghraib, Gender, and the Military 79

4 The Body as Political Corpus 112

Part III The Landscape of War

5 Controlling the Frame: Photojournalism, Digital Technology, and "Modern Warfare" 151

6 Israel/Palestine and the Political Imaginary 183.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813553955

0813553954

9780813553948

0813553946

9780813553962

0813553962

OCLC:

765881950