The War In-Between: Indexing a Visual Culture of Survival

Wendy Kozol

Abstract

Against the fabric of suffering that unfolds around more spectacular injuries and deaths, The War In-Between studies visual depictions of the routine and often inscrutable aspects of militarized violence. Visual artifacts ranging from photographs and video to needlework, craft projects, and data visualizations provide different vantage points on militarism, whether it is the banality of everyday violence for non-combatants or the daily struggles of soldiers living with physical and emotional trauma. Three interrelated concepts frame The War In-Between. First, the concept of the in-between attends to those interstitial spaces of war where violence and survival persist side-by-side. Second, this analysis expands the concept of indexicality to consider how images of the in-between rely on a range of indexical traces to produce alternative visualities about survival and endurance. Third, the book develops an asymptotic approach that explores the value of getting close to war in-between’s diverse experiences, even if the horizon line of experience is always just out of reach. Exploring the capaciousness of survival reveals that there is more to feel and engage in war images than just mangled bodies, collapsing buildings, desperation, and industrialized death. The War In-Between offers not a better truth about war but an accounting of visualities that arise at the otherwise unthinkable junction of conflict and survival.

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Publication Date

5-7-2024

Department

Comparative American Studies

Document Type

Book

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9781531507220.001.0001

Keywords

Asymptotic analysis, Critical military studies, In-betweenness, Indexicality, Visual cultures of war

ISBN

9781531507244

Language

English

Format

text

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