Journal ArticleDOI
Mapping Contemporary American War Culture
TLDR
A wide-ranging survey of the uneven and plural militarization of US war culture and everyday life during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan can be found in this article, which argues that the cultural authority and representational confidence of recent war culture draws on the "consolidated vision" of empire, but paradoxically its power is based not on grand narratives but rests on much more partial, fragmented, and incoherent representations of wartime.Abstract:
This essay offers a wide-ranging survey of the uneven and plural militarization of US war culture and everyday life during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It argues that the cultural authority and representational confidence of recent war culture draws on the “consolidated vision” of empire, but that paradoxically its power is based not on grand narratives but rests on much more partial, fragmented, and incoherent representations of wartime. It explores the unstable “homeland” imaginary constituted around the militarization and racialization of urban policing and surveillance since the Cold War recently contested by Black Lives Matter; the distancing, dominant representations of wars abroad through high tech warfare and hypermasculine paramilitary special forces; the emergent normalization of torture and trauma; and the sacralization of the veteran. The essay explores work by Phil Klay, Brian Turner, Sinan Antoon, and the film, Zero Dark Thirty , and offers extended discussions of Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and the TV drama The Wire .read more
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Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
TL;DR: In this article, the authors leave blank a blank page intentionally left blank from inquiry to academic writing a text and reader aronson11e fm aronson 11e e m aronson et al.
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Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War Writing
TL;DR: This article explored the military failures, damaged archives, cultural silences, trauma, and human costs of the Iraq War, and suggested that much recent war writing by Kevin Powers, Brian Turner, Sinan Antoon, and the anonymous Iraqi blogger Riverbend speaks against postwar recovery in striking ways.
Militarized Patriotism: Constructing Norms Of Patriotic Behavior Through The Image Of The Soldier In Film
TL;DR: In this paper, Cramer argued that the attempt to portray the real events of Vietnam constructed an image of the wounded soldier that allowed audiences to empathize with American veterans, and that the image became a repressive mechanism that now works to legitimize a permanent state of war.
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Pivot to Asia: Iraq War Literature and Asian/American Women
TL;DR: From Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) to Lloyd Gruver and Hanaogi in James A. Michener's Sayonara (1953) the trope of romantic relationships be...
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Unreality in America: Reading Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in a Post-Truth Age
TL;DR: In discussions of post-truth, writers have on the whole assumed that it is primarily a new phenomenon related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however momentous that election was as discussed by the authors.
References
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Book
Culture and Imperialism
TL;DR: From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to the media coverage of the Gulf War, this is an account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.
Book
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
TL;DR: The mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control in the UK as much as in the US as mentioned in this paper, despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men.
Book
Marxism and literature
TL;DR: In this paper, Williams extended the theme of Raymond Williams's earlier work in literary and cultural analysis by outlining a theory of "cultural materialism" which integrates Marxist theories of language with literature.
Book
The body in pain
TL;DR: Elaine Scarry analyses the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of warfare and torture, and she demonstrates how political regimes use the power of physical pain to attack and break down the sufferer's sense of self.