In/Visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780813585383)

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that "America" is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans.

Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.


Author: Jon Simons
ISBN-10: 0813585384
ISBN-13: 9780813585383
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/14/2017
Pages: 286
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.07h x 6.06w x 0.93d