In / Visible War ─ The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America

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.

JON SIMONS is Reader in Media at Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Images: A Reader.

JOHN LOUIS LUCAITES is the associate dean for arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences and provost professor of rhetoric in the department of English at Indiana University. His most recent work includes No Caption Needed: Photojournalism, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.