War and Representation

Course rationale

Discourse is a key concept to understand in political and cultural geography, given that so much of our human geographical knowledge is dependent upon its multiple forms. In the West, very few of us have ever seen war, for example; it is typically waged externally in foreign fields. Therefore, how it is discursively (re)presented to us from afar is paramount. Our geographical imaginings of difference and conflict legitimise and frame both our waging and subsequent representations of war. Images and narratives of war serve to translate, prioritise and frequently destroy knowledge. They not only help us to sanitise and forget the wounds of history, but also play pivotal roles in legitimising and contesting the geopolitics of new wars in the multimedia context of the modern world.

Drawing on recent work in critical geopolitics, this module is centred on interrogating the enduring significance of the scripting of imaginative geographies of war in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It explores the production of, and resistance to, multiple material, textual and audio-visual discourses of war as the products and producers of geopolitical power. Focusing in particular on World War I, the Vietnam War and ongoing war on terror, the module aims to cultivate students' capacities to recognise Foucault?s 'power/knowledge couplet' within all forms of discourse, and prompts a systematic deconstructing of the subtle but purposeful connections between discourse and practice in contemporary geopolitics.
Key learning outcomes

* To learn to interrogate diverse discourses of war from different and conflicting media and to deconstruct the specific geopolitical, ideological and institutional logics of their creation.

* To recognise the selectivity, politics and power relations of all forms of discourse and to appreciate how prioritised geographical knowledge is scripted, disseminated and contested.

* More broadly, to see the critical significance of representation in the modern world and to decipher the integral connections between geopolitical discourse and geopolitical action.

Assessment (5 ECTS)

Essay (50%)

- 2000-word term paper

Exam (50%)

- 2 questions in 2 hours (choice of 4)

Some key readings

M. Evans and K. Lunn (eds), 1997, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, Berg, Oxford

D. Gregory, 2004, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Blackwell, Oxford

N.C. Johnson, 2003, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

D. Kishan Thussu and D. Freedman (eds), 2003, War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7, Sage, London

J. Lembcke, 1998, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York University Press, New York

E. Said, 1994, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London