War Imagery Research Articles

Media Discourse Regarding COVID-19 Vaccinations for Children Aged 5 to 11 Years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: Comparative Analysis Using the Narrative Policy Framework.

Media narratives can shape public opinion and actions, influencing the uptake of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic has occurred at a time where infodemics, misinformation, and disinformation are present, impacting the COVID-19 response. This study aims to investigate how narratives about pediatric COVID-19 vaccines in the media of 4 English-speaking countries: the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Narrative Policy Framework was used to guide the comparative analyses of the major print and web-based news agencies' media regarding COVID-19 vaccines for children aged 5 to 11 years. Data were sought using systematic searching on Factiva (Dow Jones) of 4 key phases of pediatric vaccine approval and rollout. A total of 400 articles (n=287, 71.8% in the United States, n=40, 10% in Australia, n=60, 15% in Canada, and n=13, 3% in the United Kingdom) met the search criteria and were included. Using the Narrative Policy Framework, the following were identified in each article: hero, villain, survivor, and plot. The United States was the earliest country to vaccinate children, and other countries' media often lauded the United States for this. Australian and Canadian media narratives about vaccines for children aged 5 to 11 years were commonly about protecting susceptible people in society, whereas the US and the UK narratives focused more on the vaccine helping children return to school. All 4 countries focused on the vaccines for children aged 5 to 11 years as being key to "ending" the pandemic. Australian and Canadian narratives frequently compared vaccine rollouts across states or provinces and bemoaned local progress in vaccine delivery compared with other countries globally. Canadian and US narratives highlighted the "infodemic" about the COVID-19 pandemic and disinformation regarding child vaccines as impeding uptake. All 4 countries-the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada-used war imagery in reporting about COVID-19 vaccines for children. The advent of the Omicron variant demonstrated that populations were fatigued by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the media reporting increasingly blamed the unvaccinated. The UK media narrative was unique in describing vaccinating children as a distraction from adult COVID-19 vaccination efforts. The United States and Canada had narratives expressing anger about potential vaccine passports for children. In Australia, general practitioners were labelled as heroes. Finally, the Canadian narrative suggested altruistic forgoing of COVID-19 vaccine "boosters" as well as pediatric COVID-19 vaccines to benefit those in poorer nations. Public health emergencies require clear; compelling and accurate communication. The stories told during this pandemic are compelling because they contain the classic elements of a narrative; however, they can be reductive and inaccurate.

Embodied Cognition and Empathic Experiences in War Communication


 
 
 Using the perspective of phenomenological-enactive embodied cognition, this paper examines the role of the body in constituting specific social interactions via specific media ecologies (war imagery) during the times of (refugee) crisis. Such media ecologies give affordances that can amplify social beliefs and turn subjective judgments into an intersubjective action. We consider the human body in relation to war media as playing an important role in sustaining social experiences and relations. To that end, the article explores the fundamental experience of empathy, combining the theoretical perspectives of phenomenology and enactivism with the examples from war imagery and refugee embodiment. It is shown that the classical phenomenological tradition offers different yet useful conceptualisations of empathy. We also argue that war images and/or messages should be viewed as means/tools for, rather than representations of, the enaction of certain important experiences. Hence, the article connects the analysis of the affection by war imagery with the subsequent social interactions in the context of refugee crisis.
 
 

The many pieces of the Covid-19 jigsaw: some reflections on waves one and two

Drawing on insights from psychology, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, health economics and medical ethics, this article explores two linked aspects of the management of the Covid-19 pandemic during its first and second waves in the UK. The first aspect is the range of cognitive and emotional responses to the imminent collapse of authority early in the crisis, and how these played out in public and private. Ultimately, the NHS fallback response was the 'Rule of Rescue', the requirement to rescue identifiable individuals in immediate peril, regardless of the cost. The second aspect is the meaning of heroism in the context of this pandemic. This includes the Clap for Carers initiative - and its function as an endorsement of others' deeds; the use of war imagery and war resources in mobilising against the infection; and the possibilities for different objects of applause to appear when seen from different standpoints. Linking these two aspects together we argue that the potential collapse of authority helps explain responses that seek heroes in the war against the virus and see war strategy and tactics as deserving of our support. We also ask what will remain of the pandemic in public memory.

War Memories and Peacebuilding in “From East Pakistan to Bangladesh”

Hearts are as much ravaged by war and as much in need of repair as burnt-out cities. Thus, the success of peacebuilding depends, at least in part, on individuals’ life writings that allow them to put their past tainted by war and its horrors behind them and offer them future possibilities of reconciliation and peace. The study of the life writing (memoirs) ‘East Pakistan to Bangladesh’ by Saadullah Khan was used as a test case in this research paper to support this argument. The critical framework of Decolonizing Trauma Theory given by Rothberg (2009) was used in this qualitative study to explore how the writer, who not only fought in the civil war in Bangladesh but was also taken as a prisoner of war, moves beyond a cycle of retaliation to something more constructive. The objective is to explore how, after facing the horrors of war, human beings can feel compassion for antagonists and offer alternative narratives divergent from the official narrative. An analysis of the war imagery demonstrates that the writer does not use it to create a meta-conflict to legitimize war, demonizing the enemy to justify the killings and polarizing us versus them as good and evil as a means for dealing with the conflict. Rather, he uses war imagery as an organizing principle, determining and impacting people’s response to the world and the war with a new perception and comprehension that emphasizes the factors of contingency and ambiguity. This approach enables him to eschew blame. Hence, he does not attribute the causes of conflict to the members of the out-group, thus suggesting possibilities of transformation and peace, rather than ascertaining factors such as the nature of the enemy that suggests the impossibility of peace.
 Keywords: decolonizing trauma, forgiveness, heroic courage, memory, peacebuilding, war

Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War

Equal Outsiders:Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War Laura Cernat In a passage from Three Guineas (1938), which rhetorically foreshadows Churchill's famous June 1940 "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, Virginia Woolf prompts women to preserve and expand their ancestresses' habit of thinking critically even while lacking some comforts. Joining the newly-available public sphere, women who had thought "while they stirred the pot" (2001a: 160) are now called to become more articulate: Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations . . . let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this "civilization" in which we find ourselves? . . . Where . . . is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? (161) These lines echo Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight," which Woolf explicitly cites later in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (1942: 155). Woolf often interweaves Romantic tropes in her plea against war. Near the end of Three Guineas, for example, she alludes to Coleridge's line from "Kubla Khan," "ancestral voices prophesying war"1 (Coleridge 1954: 298), when she speaks of "some ancestral memory prophesying war" (Woolf 2001a: 218). Such resonances of Romantic affects in Modernism are both frequent and meaningful, as the work of Mary Favret (2010) and Alexandra Harris (2010) shows. While Favret emphasizes the skewed remoteness of war imagery, especially for the British imagination, and Harris sees the Modernists' return to the Romantics as a tradition-embracing homecoming, an "imaginative claiming of England" [End Page 121] (10), they both give less attention to the implications of the Romantic connection for a conception of community that truly goes beyond nationalism. Building on an understudied textual reference, this paper traces some threads that tie Woolf's attitudes towards war to her critical response to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge's, as she works to dissociate the representation of women from "romance" (a trivialized inheritance of Romanticism) and recover the societal ideals of Romanticism for the feminist cause. Significantly, Woolf refers to Romantic writers at a crucial point in her argument. After delving into historical and socio-economic issues, after invoking both "the white light of facts" and "the coloured light of biography" (2001a: 143), after imagining the Society of Outsiders, Woolf sounds weary, almost unsure at the end of Three Guineas. Having unveiled the connection between war, capitalist greed, and the oppression of women, having proposed indifference to honors and the refusal of excess as chief solutions, Woolf points to something not yet fully thought out: "we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods" (241). To indicate the purpose of these new, outsider-specific methods, Woolf falls back on "the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty" (241) and, in her very last endnote, cites three sources that might reveal "the views and aims of the outsiders" (293): Romantic writers from different nations—S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. Woolf's use of three examples from the 19th century suggests a renewed reliance on the Romantic paradigm. Although Favret, drawing on Woolf's notes in "The Leaning Tower" about the relatively limited effects of war on novelists such as Austen and Scott, thinks that Woolf underestimated her own remoteness from war and unfairly considered the 19th century "immune" to mass conflict in a way the 20th century was not (Favret 46), Woolf's return to the Romantics and their social models at the end of her pacifist essay suggests that her very conception of the nature of mass conflict has its roots in the 19th century. There is more at stake in Woolf's pointing towards Coleridge as a precursor of the Society of Outsiders than first meets the eye. This neglected reference reveals a deep-seated affinity between the two writers' worldviews, which functions in spite of (or perhaps...

History as a Weapon: Second World War Imagery in the Ongoing Russian–Ukrainian Cyberwar

History as a Weapon: Second World War Imagery in the Ongoing Russian–Ukrainian CyberwarThe article focuses on the characteristics of military posters employed as an element of the ongoing Russia–Ukrainian hybrid war in the Donbas region. The paper also examines the functions which posters fulfil in times of military conflict and analyses the role which posters play in persuading and mobilizing society, recruiting soldiers, and maintaining high morale among troops.The research material includes posters that were exhibited in 2014–2017, when the most significant battles took place. The article focuses on the verbal aspects of the posters as well as on the visual constructions of “friends” and “foes”. Furthermore, this investigation analyses the Second World War (WWII) images and symbols that have been used in both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian posters. Historia jako broń: obrazowanie drugiej wojny światowej w trwającej cyberwojnie rosyjsko-ukraińskiejAutorka koncentruje się na charakterystyce plakatów wojskowych wykorzystywanych jako element trwającej w regionie Donbasu rosyjsko-ukraińskiej wojny hybrydowej. Bada również funkcje, jakie pełnią plakaty w czasie konfliktu zbrojnego oraz analizuje rolę, jaką odgrywają w przekonywaniu i mobilizowaniu społeczeństwa, rekrutacji żołnierzy oraz utrzymywaniu wysokiego poziomu morale wśród wojska.Materiał badawczy obejmuje plakaty, które były eksponowane w latach 2014–2017, kiedy rozegrano najbardziej znaczące bitwy. W artykule autorka skupiła uwagę na werbalnych aspektach plakatów, a także na wizualnych konstrukcjach „przyjaciół” i „wrogów”. Ponadto analizuje wizerunek drugiej wojny światowej, motywy i symbole z przeszłości, które zostały wykorzystane zarówno w plakatach proukraińskich, jak i prorosyjskich.

Reframing the Present

Since the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest movement and the ousting of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and his administration, Ukraine has been embroiled in a political crisis both domestically and with its neighbour, Russia. Namely, the Ukrainian state has lost the Crimean Peninsula to a Russian military incursion and remains engaged in the local Donbas War against pro-Russian insurrectionists. Alongside these events, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration has been waging an information war against Ukraine through its employment of Russian state media. In doing so, Russian state media has revived and internationalized Soviet historical narratives of the Great Patriotic War, discrediting the present Ukrainian state by associating it with historic examples of fascism. Thus, this paper argues that contemporary Russian attempts to reframe Ukrainian national history along a Russo-Soviet narrative, without consideration for the more authentically Ukrainian nationalist narrative, is irrespective of the Ukrainian historical experience and is a dangerous abuse of Great Patriotic War imagery in the present. Considering the legacy of the former imperial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and the Russian state’s current interest in restoring bygone prestige, this dimension of the current threat to Ukrainian sovereignty should not be ignored.

Black Women at War: A Comprehensive Framework for Research on the Strong Black Woman

The “strong Black woman” image has historically served as a justification for Black women’s oppression. While the image persists as a measure of control, it also serves as a powerful agent for Black women’s survival in an oppressive world. The seemingly contradictory nature of this image has put scholars in a position to shift the framing of strength to consider its functionality. As a point of intervention, this conceptual review advances a comprehensive framework that articulates the ever-shifting functions of strength based upon 30 years of prior research. It employs war imagery, likening strength to facets of combat, to organize these ideas into a perspicuous heuristic. Advancing a new, comprehensive framework on strength will help scholars more fully understand the functionality of strength and the vital roles it plays in Black women’s lives. The implications of this framework for scholars, practitioners, Black women, and allies are discussed.

Beyond Beyond

Beyond Beyond Jerry Harp (bio) Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz Graywolf Press https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/postcolonial-love-poem 120 Pages; Print, $16.00 In her poem "The First Body is the Water," a title calling the reader into the interconnections that run through Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem, the poet writes, "Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine." As the litany of words at the end of this passage bears witness, they "are same" not because of some brute identity, but rather because they are bodies sharing being, energy that is prayer moving in a current, motion that is medicine. In this poem engaged in multiple modes of translation—"Every text remains in mourning until it is translated," the poet quotes—these words in motion emphasize a translation that is also transformation, a realm where Diaz moves and dwells. In the title poem, Diaz plays on words by ringing their changes: "I've been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, / can stop the bleeding." The "blood" of "bloodstones"—a healing stone so named because its hematite component gives it red specks—transforms into the literal blood of "bleeding" from snakebite. This spilling of blood and talk of a wound then move into a concern with war in relation to what bloodstone can do: "most people forgot this / when the war ended." No sooner do I ask what war this line refers to than I find the poem anticipating the question, stating, "The war ended, depending on which war you mean," and going on to list possibilities that include "those we started, / before those, millennia ago and onward, / those which started me." In a poem of such elemental images as "bloodstone," "the jaspers of our desires," a "flash flood" that "bolts the arroyo," and "bodies like wounds," I think it's fair to regard these "wars" that go back "millennia ago and onward" as the struggles of our shared evolutionary past, whose marks, energies, and impulses we still carry, and whose will to dominate continues to motivate the wars of our very day, as it motivated the colonization in the wake of which these poems take their shape. As these poems aver, the struggle to channel our more aggressive energies in creative and socially just directions continues. The poem then shifts to a seemingly different kind of struggle as the speaker declares, "I was built by wage," and within the same line, the word "wage" shifts to a verb: So I wage love and worse—always another campaign to march acrossa desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skinsettling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast. This verb commonly associated with war—as in "to wage war"—here associates with a love infused with the imagery of war, from marching to the flash of cannon to smoke, the latter two images directly associated with the beloved's body. As Diaz writes in another poem, "This is the war I was born toward, her skin" ("Skin-Light"). This love, embedded in struggle, translates potentially destructive energies into a love that unites by means of a vital tension. It's a complicated poem about a complicated love, a love poem that is also a poem of agon. These poems' multiple transformations signal a sensibility attuned to a world in movement, unending transformation, unexpected combinations and syntheses:—"Energy is a moving river moving my moving body" ("The First River is the Body"); "One way to love a sister, help her bleed light" ("Blood-Light"); "one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale" ("These Hands, If Not Gods"); "The coyote answers by lifting its head / and crying stars" ("Manhattan is a Lenape Word"); "we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court" ("Run 'n Gun"); "Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. / Transubstantiation bone" ("Ode to the Beloved's Hips"); "We must go beyond beyond to a place where we have never been the center, where there is no center—beyond, toward...

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture

“The Right Can’t Meme”: Transgression and Dissimulation in the Left Unity Memeolution of PixelCanvas

“The Right Can’t Meme”: Transgression and Dissimulation in the Left Unity Memeolution of PixelCanvas

Survive to be critical: The Wartime Graphic as a ‘masquerading’ media in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905

By focusing on unconventional war imagery of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) in The Wartime Graphic, a widely popular pictorial war magazine in Japan, this article uncovers an art of publishing critical materials under the difficult circumstances of modern total war. The magazine’s contents suggest that it was a ‘masquerading’ media which provided critical cultural space while circumventing censorship. Examining the space and expressions in the middle ground, this article will shed light on considerable yet hitherto overlooked dimensions of wartime Japanese press and Japanese society, challenging dichotomous understandings of ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-’ war.

Performing Individualism. Two Tendencies Dismantling War Imagery in Croatian and Serbian Historical Novels of the 1960s

Abstract The article aims at addressing the question of representations of World War Two in Croatian and Serbian literature that were subversive in the sense that they queried the legend not simply by rejecting communism and affirming nationalism, but by emphasizing the uncertainty and sensibility of the human beings, a typical modern reaction to violence and, in general, modernist topoi. In this article I will focus on modernist novelistic representations of the 1960s in which the uncertainty and instability of collective warrants are foregrounded. As a result a subversive meaning is produced which contradicts not only communism and revolution but more generally war as such, including the universal features of war such as confronting loneliness, love as an expression of an individual rather than a collective sense of existence, and the impossibility of a valid representation of past events.

God’s victory and salvation. A soteriological approach to the subject in apocalyptic literature

One of the main points of interests in the apocalyptic literature is the salvation of God’s people. The topic is shown from a variety of perspectives. One of them is exceptional and very prominent in the apocalyptic genre – this is God’s victory. The theme of victory is a complex one. It consists of not only terminology and imagery of war, fight, rivalry, but also judgement, competition and kingdom. All of these motifs are being intertwined in the apocalyptic victory of God. The problem of God’s victory can be seen as schematic, which is present in many texts from the apocalyptic genre. Altering variables inside this scheme results in a different outlook on the salvation. It is used to give the shape of the narrative in the text. From the variety of apocalyptic literature, an exceptional place is given to the Apocalypse of John. The theme of God’s victory there, although it uses the Jewish traditions, is rewritten and upgraded to a new unique form. The goal of this article is to investigate how the mentioned schematic realises through different examples of apocalyptic texts and how it is incorporated and redefined in the Book of Apocalypse. What is God’s victory? Who is being conquered? With what means? What does it all mean to the salvation of people? These are the questions, which the author will try to answer in the article.

Combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder and longitudinal hyper-responsivity to trauma-related visual stimuli: stability over 2 years

Introduction: Soldiers with combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show survival-mode functioning, implying generalized hyper-arousal along with a memory bias for trauma-related stimuli. To date, a precise spatiotemporal characterization of maladaptive neurophysiological responses underlying experiential trauma reminders in PTSD is lacking. We used magnetoencephalography to investigate rapid evoked responses during visual processing and delayed recognition of war-related versus neutral pictures in soldiers with PTSD and trauma-exposed peers who did not develop PTSD. Methods: The sample consisted of 24 soldiers with PTSD who had served in Afghanistan and 28 war-exposed soldiers without PTSD, matched for combat exposure, military experience, and rank. We completed longitudinal follow-up studies 2 years later with 35 of these same soldiers, 13 with PTSD and 22 control participants. We analysed brain activation evoked by visual processing and delayed recognition tasks that involved both war-related and neutral pictures, and we used a mixed-effects model to determine whether changes in activity occurred between the two test periods. Results: In the visual processing task, soldiers with PTSD showed rapid-onset and sustained hyper-activation for war-related imagery in the left temporal pole and superior frontal gyrus and the right calcarine. In contrast, control soldiers exhibited greater activity for war-related imagery in the left temporal–parietal junction and right inferior frontal gyrus. In the delayed recognition task, both groups showed increased activity in occipital cortices for war images compared with neutral images. A crucial finding was that, compared with control participants, the PTSD group also showed elevated and sustained activation in limbic areas for war imagery. Discussion: These results characterize the evoked neurophysiology underlying hyper-responsivity found in soldiers with PTSD at the juncture of stress and memory in contrast to their trauma-exposed peers without PTSD.

Image à lire : pour une éthique contemporaine du récit de guerre

Cet article explore la relation que les récits de guerre de fiction établissent avec la mise en images de la guerre, dans la perspective debordienne d’un monde en proie à une spectacularisation qui aliène les individus et les collectivités de la réalité de l’expérience. Romans et pièces de théâtre de Wajdi Mouawad, Maïssa Bey et Mathias Énard sont interpellés pour voir comment la littérature contemporaine produit un discours éthique au sujet de la représentation visuelle de la guerre, recomplexifie la réalité des événements en réponse à une certaine tendance actuelle à banaliser les images, interroge les modes d’interaction avec l’expérience de la guerre qui procèdent surtout de l’exploitation du visuel, et accomplit tout ceci en maintenant, par les recours que permettent la langue littéraire et le registre fictionnel, une distance critique par rapport à leur propre pratique.

Unfolding female quiet in wargames: gender bias in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain from representation to gameplay

This article investigates the cultural mediatization of the relationship between gender and war by looking at the representation and agency of female presence in one of the most popular sagas in video games: Metal Gear Solid. We have specifically focused on the last chapter of the series, Metal Gear Solid V (MGS5) by putting under scrutiny the character of Quiet. The analysis draws upon the rich theoretical corpus of feminist film studies, with reference to two main concepts: the “visual pleasure” by Laura Mulvey and the “female voice” by Kaja Silverman. These analytic tools are employed in order to scrutinize both the visual representation and the design of the game. We argue that MGS5 is a relevant instance of a large part of gaming production that develops a war imagery characterized by (a) the exploitation of women and (b) an employment of female body as a tool to fulfill the visual pleasure of the male gaze. The figure of Quiet, with the oversexualization of her body and the deprivation of her voice, is particularly telling in this respect. Our analysis aims to identify effective solutions in order to think about more inclusive digital games able to address conflictual issues without surrendering to sexism.

Solon and the Rhetoric of Stasis

This article considers how Solon recasts the traditional imagery of warfare and violence in order to bolster his persona as a “reconciler” (cf. Ath. Pol. 5.1–2) and peacemaker. Beginning with the fragments of his Salamis, I examine Solon’s skilled use of persona and emotion, building on the elegiac tradition of martial exhortation. Turning to fr. 4, I trace one of its most striking features, namely, the way it applies the language of epic warfare to stasis, and so suggests that the dichotomies of war versus peace, and enemy versus self, do not work in contemporary Athens. The manipulation of epic language and war imagery to support Solon’s role as reconciler is equally evident in fr. 5, and communicates Solon’s role as an outstanding and impartial protector, whose achievement has been to save the Athenians from unjust (i.e., internal) violence. In fr. 36, one of the most fascinating surviving examples of the political use of iambus in the archaic period, Solon foregrounds the damage to Athenian society caused by greed, debt, and enslavement for it and presents his unbiased reforms as having prevented civil war. By adapting epic imagery, Solon emphasizes his unfair treatment as an outsider, as he, the saviour of his community, is cast in the role of an antisocial animal. Finally, in fr. 37, Solon’s imagery is geared to arguing that the current conflict is best resolved not by violence but by peaceful agreement, a symbol of reconciliation embodied in Solon himself. Throughout my discussion, I focus on how Solon uses two strategies in particular to communicate the importance of his role: the first is the way he applies military language and metaphors to political situations and relationships in order to highlight the evils of stasis; the second is the way he recasts traditional imagery of warfare and violence to highlight his efforts, and his success, as a “reconciler” (διαλλακτής) of the warring parties.

Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini Amanda Dawson Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage. By Sara Soncini. University of Exeter Press, 2015. Cloth $100.00, Paper $35.00. xvii + 295 pages. Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015) by Sara Soncini is a monograph that considers how contemporary wars are presented on the British stage. This book investigates plays, playwrights, productions, and the strategies they deploy in responding to contemporary wars and issues of representation through storytelling and performance. The book posits a correlation between real-world conflict and how it is represented on stage, assessing the impact of theatre as a tool for understanding war and violence. Through a close reading of over twenty-five plays, Forms of Conflict investigates the cultural and political relevance of these plays. Moreover, the author seeks to answer questions of how theatre provides new ways of interpreting war in a world "enmeshed in permanent war" (xiii), and how new wars influence new forms of dramatic storytelling. Forms of Conflict makes a compelling argument that, just as the landscape of war is ever changing, so is the landscape of new war plays (post-9/11 conflicts). This in-depth look at new wars on the British stage is a welcome addition to scholarship on representations of war. Soncini looks at plays that highlight new techniques and insights on contemporary warfare and global representation. These scripts were written by British and British-based writers, and even a few non-British playwrights whose work premiered in the UK, including Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, and David Hare, among others. Some of the plays are well known while others remain unpublished. Soncini also attended productions, when possible, at [End Page 167] major theatres, as well as at smaller theatre companies. While the texts are Soncini's primary materials, she felt "more comfortable" discussing plays she saw in person or on video (xv). The monograph is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, "Introduction: Mapping the Terrain," Soncini presents her argument about "new wars" in opposition to "old wars" (xiii). Old wars might simply be described as what is typically thought of as wars in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. "Old wars," Soncini writes, are in the "Clausewitzean modes of conflict," referencing Carl von Clausewitz and his foundational theories about war, published in On War in 1832 (xiii). New wars, on the other hand, are looser in definition, perhaps explained best as forms of organized violence, which is meant to include mass acts of violence and terrorism, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001. The plays investigated here were written and performed close to or after 9/11. Chapter 2, titled "This is Not a War," "sets out to fathom the reverberations of the increasingly virtual nature of contemporary wars on the visual and verbal textures of their dramatic reconfigurations" (19). In many of the plays discussed in this chapter, the visual, visceral imagery of war is absent, unlike in film as Soncini notes, where the violence of war is almost always present. This absence of war is not unusual in war plays at large, but is arguably more prevalent in contemporary war plays. For example, Soncini describes the 1997 production of Caryl Churchill's This is a Chair at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which began with a proj ection of a text reading "'The War in Bosnia,'" while the action on stage was of a man holding flowers as he waits for his date. This highlights Soncini's argument for how the fighting and violence of war serves as the backdrop or even the topic of the play, yet is not fully present. Soncini shifts her focus to documentary theatre in chapters 3 and 4 by engaging with playwright David Hare, a major figure in war-based theatre. Hare's 2002 article in the Guardian, "Why Fabulate?," provides the title for Soncini's third chapter, in which Hare questions whether fiction is the appropriate form for examining war. The chapter discusses documentary theatre and its reflections of reality by highlighting tribunal plays, which utilize official transcripts, such as...

Remediating Destroyed Human Bodies: Contemporaneity and Habits of Online Visual Culture

Remediating Destroyed Human Bodies: Contemporaneity and Habits of Online Visual Culture