Depictions Of Conflict Research Articles

The Politics of Photobooks: From Brecht’s War Primer (1955) to Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer 2 (2011)

This essay intervenes in debates about the depiction of conflict since 1945, by comparing two highly significant photographic ‘hacks’: Brecht’s War Primer (Kriegsfibel) 1955; and Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer 2, 2011. Kriegsfibel is a collection of images, snipped from wartime newspapers and magazines, which Brecht selected and situated alongside the four-line verses that he used to comment upon and re-caption his pictures. These acerbic ‘photo–epigrams’ captured Brecht’s view, firstly, that photography had become a ‘terrible weapon against truth’ and secondly, that by repositioning the individual image, its political instrumentality might be restored. When, more than half a century later, Broomberg & Chanarin decide to re-work Kriegsfibel to produce War Primer 2, they effectively crash into and redouble the Brechtian hack; updating and further complicating Brecht’s insights; re-animating his original concerns with photography as a form of collective historical elucidation and mounting, literally on top of his pictures of wartime conflict, images from the ‘war on terror’. This essay argues that the re-doubling of War Primer performs multiple critical tasks. It explores the Kriegsfibel as a dynamic confrontation with images of war and stages the enduring need to interrogate and actively re-function images of conflict from WW2 to the present day. It re-examines debates about images as weapons of war in themselves, and finally, it situates the Kriegsfibel assemblage in relation to contemporary understandings of ‘post-truth’.

Disability and Memory in Posthuman(ist) Narrative: Reading Prosthesis and Amnesia in Hollywood’s Re-membering of the ‘War on Terror’

What is the memory of the human in posthuman formations of cultural narrative? To what extent is such memory driven by a powerful anti-humanism or, conversely, a nostalgia for a human(ist) modes of being? This article will argue that a consideration of disability representation offers an optic through which to addresses these questions. It will focus on two terms – prosthesis and amnesia – that describe disability experiences but are also central concepts in memory studies. Exploring the interactions and tensions between these different manifestations, the article will argue for the possibility of a productive critical mode that brings together approaches from both memory and disability studies to analyse posthumanist conceptions of culture, particularly in relation to the portrayal of war and conflict. It will then move to focus on an analysis of three high-profile Hollywood films – Green Zone (2010), Source Code (20) and The Hurt Locker (2008) – that bring together depictions of conflict, technology and selfhood, and read them from within a disability optic that focuses on prostheses and amnesia. In Green Zone and Source Code, military power is rooted in technology and networked assemblages, but the human body itself is seen to be fragile and the films frequently return to core humanist conceptions of the individual in re-membering selfhood and resolving narrative issues. The article will suggest that The Hurt Locker, which also explores questions of power, technology and the human, enacts more complex notions of disability and memory, using them to potentially undermine humanist categories. It will end by noting that, while there are emerging creative and critical opportunities for interrogating humanism through the representation of memory and disability, mainstream cinema is caught between a fascination for technological potentials and the pull of classic human/individual-centred narratives.

Mentorship in the 21st Century: Celebrating Uptake or Lamenting Lost Meaning?

Mentorship in the 21st Century: Celebrating Uptake or Lamenting Lost Meaning?

Gender: The Hidden God in Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu du Carnage

Most critics have analyzed acclaimed playwright Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du Carnage (2007) as a descent into savagery. This close examination of the play points to the role of gender norms and stereotypes in causing the decline in civility. By taking part in a culture that worships gender ideals, the characters in Reza’s play police one another’s actions to ensure that everyone behaves like proper men and women. The act of attempting to successfully perform femininity or masculinity leads to the evening’s disastrous events. In contrast with readings that have erased gender from the power dynamics of the play and its depiction of conflict, this article reveals the God of Carnage to be gender.

Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq by Kate McLoughlin (review)

Reviewed by: Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq by Kate McLoughlin Roy Scranton Kate McLoughlin , Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ix + 221 pp. Kate McLoughlin's ranging, acrobatic, erudite, perspicacious, and occasionally flawed rhetorical analysis of war literature, Authoring War, aims to describe a handful of literary strategies that characterize writing about war from ancient Greece to contemporary Mesopotamia. The book does not quite pay out these global ambitions. In fact, her book is mostly concerned with British and American literature from the sixteenth century on, though she does address a few examples in translation, most notably War and Peace. McLoughlin structures Authoring War thematically, with chapters on "Credentials," "Details," "Zones," "Duration," "Diversions," and "Laughter." Each chapter takes up a range of texts and brings a variety of theoretical approaches to elucidate that chapter's theme. Chapter 2, for example, on "Details," includes discussion and digressions on Henry V and 1 Henry VI, Paradise Lost, Byron's Don Juan, and Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, along with selected poems by Robert Southey, Cecil Day Lewis, George Orwell, Siegfried Sassoon, and Keith Douglas; it brings Bakhtin, Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Derrida, Freud, the Gothic body, Jakobson, Kant, the Greek concept of kleos, David Lodge, W. J. T. Mitchell, and much else to bear on these texts and on the theorization of name-tallying versus synecdoche in war literature. Thirty-one pages take us from the Hundred Years War to 1938, from drama to epic to lyric to novel, and yet, despite the fact that this chapter is specifically about the problem of "how to frame the huge scale of war for human comprehension," the frame remains distinctly limited: the texts dealt with are predominantly within an Anglo-American literary tradition and the approach securely inside the boundaries of post-structuralist literary theory (52). [End Page 350] The most significant trouble with Authoring War is that McLoughlin's main arguments are not just about war literature, but about war itself. McLoughlin's central argument opens with and builds upon the claim that war "resists depiction, and does so in multifarious ways" (6-7). This idea, adapted from trauma theory, is an unstable foundation on which to build an analysis. The first problem with this claim is that "war" is an abstraction, a concept, a category of complex human endeavor (like "marriage," "justice," "capitalism," or "religion"). In asserting that "war" resists depiction, McLoughlin begs the question of how we "depict" abstraction in the first place, and specifically the question of what the relation is between a literary example and the abstract concept it supposedly exemplifies. Certainly Aeschylus's Agamemnon depicts marriage, but so do The Tale of Genji, Jane Eyre, and The Waste Land. At what point are we justified in making essentialist, transhistorical claims about "marriage" and its depiction? The second problem is the implicit presumption that war is special or singular in its being "impossible" to represent. Without delving into the age-old problems of mimesis, the status of language vis-à-vis its referents, or phenomenologies of reading, it must be clear to anyone who thinks about linguistic representation at all that reality itself "resists depiction." Translating lived experience, material being, and sense data into nouns, verbs, and syntactical relations is a vexingly difficult task, and it is a near miracle that we do it with such aplomb, day after day. If it is true that war resists depiction, war is no different from countless other aspects of human existence, such as "the self," Spain, going to the grocery store, society, consciousness, eating an apple, swimming, and love. Alternatively, if the statement that war "resists depiction" means that "war is specially charged because huge in scale, devastating in impact and encompassing of human behaviour in its greatest trials and intimacies" and that this is precisely "what makes war impossible or very difficult to write about" (8-9), then this claim is demonstrably wrong. As McLoughlin herself points out (using the terms "conflict" and "war" somewhat interchangeably), "depiction of conflict is ubiquitous and of ancient standing" (7). That is, writing about...

The Indian nation and selective amnesia: representing conflicts and violence in Indian history textbooks

Abstract‘Unity is always obtained by means of brutality’ wrote Ernest Renan. Following this idea, this article investigates how social conflicts and violence are included or muted in national history. This is done by comparing the successive series of history textbooks used in India in the postindependence period. The historical narratives contained in the textbooks were influenced by different conceptions of the Indian nation, and these variations allow us to observe and better understand what is remembered or forgotten in the national narrative. We will see that conflicts and violence are referred to when they involve the nation against its ‘other’ but depictions of conflicts within the nation as it is imagined are avoided. Thus, certain violent episodes of the past find a place in the national historical narrative, yet violence in itself is never described.

The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (review)

Reviewed by: The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen Holly Wardlow Warwick Anderson. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 318 pp. Ill. $26.95 (978-0-8018-9040-6). In its depiction of how kuru, a fatal neurological disorder found among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, was investigated and eventually understood, The Collectors of Lost Souls is both a gripping and academically rigorous read. Although it is a chronicle of the kuru investigation and an analysis of colonial medical science, the chapters describing the competing explanatory paradigms read a bit like a whodunit (the slow virus or the prion?). The book is organized chronologically, with each chapter taking the reader a bit farther along the tortuous path of biomedical revelation. Kuru’s initial observers in the early 1950s interpreted the symptoms (uncontrollable shaking, partial paralysis) as hysteria. Later, medical investigators examined the gamut of possibilities from toxins in the environment, to nutritional deficiencies, to infectious agents, to genetic heritability. All of this research required the cooperation of the Fore people and especially their consent for the collection of tissue samples, namely brain matter. The acquisition of brains became increasingly important in 1959 when William J. Hadlow, a veterinary pathologist, observed that kuru-afflicted brains resembled the brains of sheep that had succumbed to scrapie, another fatal neurological disease. This observation led to the inoculation of kuru victims’ brain tissue into chimpanzees, and by 1967 these experiments demonstrated the infectious nature of kuru, even if the agent and the mechanism by which it was [End Page 143] spread was a mystery. Later experiments showed that the mysterious infectious agent was impervious to nucleic acid destruction but highly vulnerable to enzymes that disrupted protein structure, which supported the theory that kuru was caused by a pathogenic protein (prion) and not a virus. Not surprisingly, over time the Fore became resentful about the never-ending requests for the brains of their dead kin, especially since no cure ever appeared even after decades of research. Anderson’s account is notable for its depiction of conflict. First, there was nationalist conflict, with Australian scientists and colonial officers trying to control or obstruct the research of the maverick American interloper, Carleton Gajdusek, who managed, through charisma, doggedness, and bullying to acquire a monopoly over the kuru brain economy. Then, of course, there were the scientific conflicts, with each new paradigm initially seen as impossible before eventually being accepted as truth. And finally, there was the conflict over whether cannibalism among the Fore was the mechanism through which prions were transmitted. Although Anderson devotes less attention to this issue, what emerges is that Gajdusek and other researchers were convinced as early as 1970 that cannibalism played a causal role and yet to some extent resisted this line of inquiry because of their fears that the Fore, and Papua New Guineans more generally, would be yet further depicted as primitive savages. This strange paradox—Gajdusek’s own fetishistic acquisitiveness for Fore brains combined with his equally possessive desire to protect the Fore from less sympathetic outsiders—haunts the text, for it suggests that it is precisely this kind of relational dynamic that animated the colonial scientific encounter. There are, of course, some critiques to be made. As an anthropologist who does research in Papua New Guinea, I couldn’t help wondering what the book would have been like if it had been cowritten with an anthropologist who might have more thoroughly taken into account Fore beliefs and practices concerning sorcery and gender. Anderson repeatedly asserts that the Fore held fast to the belief that sorcery was the cause of kuru; however, he never discusses what happened to the presumably many people accused of kuru sorcery or why sorcery beliefs remained so robust. Similarly, Papua New Guinea societies are known for the complexity of their gender beliefs and practices and the fact that most kuru victims were women would have been interpreted through and, in return, shaped Fore notions of gender. These concerns might seem to fall outside the purview of Anderson’s investigation, and yet because he draws so much (and yet quite...

The Semantics of Love: Conflict, Sublimation and Experience in Arabic Discourse

Abstract A resilient pattern of early Arabic discourse depicts love as a statement of conflict between passion and rules of reasonable and socially approved behaviour. The antagonism is surmounted by sublime love replacing the initial aspiration in the course of a process of refinement. The resulting contradictive stance – emotional attachment becoming even more intense as the beloved is absented by adverse circumstance – inspires intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual experience, as it is valid for profane relationship and for divine love. The work of Dāʾūd al-Anṭākī (d. 1599) is discussed here to demonstrate that Arabic tradition, in contrast to European notions of sensitivity, increasingly concentrated on the expression of aesthetic and spiritual experience to the detriment of depictions of conflict setting the individual against social rules and norms. In his late and widespread compendium, the author, famous physician and practical philosopher, analyses the discourse on love. Displaying a rationalist, non-idealistic, down-to-earth attitude, he pursues a critical interest in the manifestations of love. By correlating profane love to the mystic’s love of God, he directs attention towards the sublime expression of longing, fear and ecstasy of fulfilment which is in his view the true signification of love and the justification for its persisting representation in literature.

“No hay negro bueno ni tamarindo dulce”

This article studies the intersections of racial, gender, and national subjectivities in Marta Rojas's novel, Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1998). I examine the entanglement of fiction and historical memory as well as the (re)appropriation and (re)construction of the slave experience as a vindication of anti-imperialist discourses. By focusing on the depictions of conflicts of race and class set in the colonial period, I also analyze the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento (racial and cultural whitening) and the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, I maintain that this novel contributes to the intellectual articulation of new forms of racialization in the Cuban context, while confronting the traditional rhetoric of White supremacy.

Certain Madness: Guy de Maupassant and Hypnotism

This essay explores the onset of the condition deemed madness in both versions of Guy de Maupassant’s horror story “The Horla” (1886/1887). Madness here characterizes the narrators’ belief in an invisible possessor named Horla, a being identifiable through empirical investigations yet resistant to scientific rationalization. More specifically, the twofold narrative blurs the institutional boundaries between science and the supernatural by introducing the creature Horla to an already unstable scientific history of nineteenth-century hypnotism. Through its depictions of conflict between personal affliction and scientific perception, “The Horla” explores the parameters of science’s unthinkable and unimaginable conceptions. Maupassant’s dual narrative portrays the fantastic experiences made possible by that which lies beyond science—experiences rationalizable only in terms of madness.