U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory

U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory PDF Author: John Bechtold
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040099580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This book analyzes how the Iraqi city of Fallujah became registered as a setting for military heroics in American memory. In 2004, the U.S. military conducted two disastrous assaults in Fallujah, Iraq. More than 1,000 citizens were killed, and, according to the military’s own estimate, upwards of 200,000 people were displaced because of the violence. Yet, despite this human catastrophe, the kind of information that emerged in the public domain during the battle foregrounded the soldier's experience in war while effacing the destruction of Iraqi bodies. This tendency to foreground the soldier body is a direct result of the military’s intervention in what they conceptualize as the "information environment." This book draws from the second assault in Fallujah as a case study to explicate the military’s investment in this perspectival space, which is a consequence both of the mediatization of contemporary war and of the need to influence knowledge considered unfavorable to military operations. In short, the military enlists the media in their targeting process to produce information that is then deployed as persuasive force to modify the beliefs of specific target populations. When the cultural texts produced by the media are remediated in the public domain after war, they can be thought of as martial constructs because they originated during war through the military’s systemized attempt to influence knowledge. That is, these texts trace to a specific battlefield objective. This book reframes the notion of propaganda as a generalized public relations strategy into a more acute and coordinated attempt to decontextualize specific knowledge in the information environment. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, war studies, memory studies, and international relations.

U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory

U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory PDF Author: John Bechtold
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040099580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyzes how the Iraqi city of Fallujah became registered as a setting for military heroics in American memory. In 2004, the U.S. military conducted two disastrous assaults in Fallujah, Iraq. More than 1,000 citizens were killed, and, according to the military’s own estimate, upwards of 200,000 people were displaced because of the violence. Yet, despite this human catastrophe, the kind of information that emerged in the public domain during the battle foregrounded the soldier's experience in war while effacing the destruction of Iraqi bodies. This tendency to foreground the soldier body is a direct result of the military’s intervention in what they conceptualize as the "information environment." This book draws from the second assault in Fallujah as a case study to explicate the military’s investment in this perspectival space, which is a consequence both of the mediatization of contemporary war and of the need to influence knowledge considered unfavorable to military operations. In short, the military enlists the media in their targeting process to produce information that is then deployed as persuasive force to modify the beliefs of specific target populations. When the cultural texts produced by the media are remediated in the public domain after war, they can be thought of as martial constructs because they originated during war through the military’s systemized attempt to influence knowledge. That is, these texts trace to a specific battlefield objective. This book reframes the notion of propaganda as a generalized public relations strategy into a more acute and coordinated attempt to decontextualize specific knowledge in the information environment. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, war studies, memory studies, and international relations.

Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia

Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia PDF Author: Nami Kim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137480130
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Drawing on cultural studies scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen's threefold notion of decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold-war, this book provides analyses of the interrelated issues concerning the relationship between Christianity and the United States' imperialist militarism in the Asia Pacific. Contributors explore the effects of US imperialist militarism on the formation of Asian and Asian American collective subjectivity and inter/intra subjectivity. The book investigates the ways in which Christianity (broadly defined), in its own complexity, has been complicit in maintaining and reinforcing US imperialist military agendas in both national and international contexts. Conversely, the volume also discusses the various sites and instances where Christianity has managed to serve as a force of resistance against US imperialist militarism.

Allies in Memory

Allies in Memory PDF Author: Sam Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107074576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A fresh perspective on World War II commemoration that identifies the central place of war memory in post-1945 transatlantic relations.

Securing Paradise

Securing Paradise PDF Author: Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395940
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts, such as the Clark and Subic Bases and the Pearl Harbor complex, have been reincarnated as destinations for tourists interested in World War II. The history of the U.S. military is foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations in such sites. At the same time, U.S. military dominance is reinforced by the logics and practices of mobility and consumption underlying modern tourism. Working in tandem, militarism and tourism produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge. These become routinized into everyday life in Hawai`i and the Philippines, inculcating U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

Close Quarters

Close Quarters PDF Author: Larry Heinemann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307517705
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict--Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford. In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.

Ethnographies of U.S. Empire

Ethnographies of U.S. Empire PDF Author: Carole McGranahan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
How do we live in and with empire? The contributors to Ethnographies of U.S. Empire pursue this question by examining empire as an unequally shared present. Here empire stands as an entrenched, if often invisible, part of everyday life central to making and remaking a world in which it is too often presented as an aberration rather than as a structuring condition. This volume presents scholarship from across U.S. imperial formations: settler colonialism, overseas territories, communities impacted by U.S. military action or political intervention, Cold War alliances and fissures, and, most recently, new forms of U.S. empire after 9/11. From the Mohawk Nation, Korea, and the Philippines to Iraq and the hills of New Jersey, the contributors show how a methodological and theoretical commitment to ethnography sharpens all of our understandings of the novel and timeworn ways people live, thrive, and resist in the imperial present. Contributors: Kevin K. Birth, Joe Bryan, John F. Collins, Jean Dennison, Erin Fitz-Henry, Adriana María Garriga-López, Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Matthew Gutmann, Ju Hui Judy Han, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Eleana Kim, Heonik Kwon, Soo Ah Kwon, Darryl Li, Catherine Lutz, Sunaina Maira, Carole McGranahan, Sean T. Mitchell, Jan M. Padios, Melissa Rosario, Audra Simpson, Ann Laura Stoler, Lisa Uperesa, David Vine

War beyond Words

War beyond Words PDF Author: Jay Winter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108293476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
What we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding, terrifying light. These lenses are not fixed; they change over time, and Jay Winter's panoramic history of war and memory offers an unprecedented study of transformations in our imaginings of war, from 1914 to the present. He reveals the ways in which different creative arts have framed our meditations on war, from painting and sculpture to photography, film and poetry, and ultimately to silence, as a language of memory in its own right. He shows how these highly mediated images of war, in turn, circulate through language to constitute our 'cultural memory' of war. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the diverse ways in which men and women have wrestled with the intractable task of conveying what twentieth-century wars meant to them and mean to us.

Dancing with the Dead

Dancing with the Dead PDF Author: Christopher T. Nelson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390078
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

A Violent Peace

A Violent Peace PDF Author: Christine Hong
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.

War and Media

War and Media PDF Author: Andrew Hoskins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565617X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media. War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics. This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.