edited by Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites
contributions by Jon Simons, Jody Madeira, Roger Stahl, De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Claudia Breger, Purnima Bose, Diane Rubenstein, James Der Derian, John Louis Lucaites, Nina Berman, David Campbell, Christopher J. Gilbert, Jeremy G. Gordon, Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol
photographs by Nina Berman
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-8135-8538-3 | eISBN: 978-0-8135-8539-0 | Paper: 978-0-8135-8537-6
Library of Congress Classification P96.W352U553 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification 070.449355020973

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.