The Desert of Experience: Jarhead and the Geography of the Persian Gulf War Geoffrey A
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Communication and Culture Dissertation
“THIS IS FOR FIGHTING, THIS IS FOR FUN”: POPULAR HOLLYWOOD COMBAT (WAR) FILMS FROM THE FIRST GULF WAR TO THE PRESENT (1990-2015) by Andrea Marie Schofield Master of Arts, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 2009 Master of Arts, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, 2008 Honours Bachelor of Arts, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 2007 A dissertation presented to Ryerson University and York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in the Program of Communication and Culture Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2016 © Andrea Schofield 2016 Author’s Declaration for Electronic Submission of a Dissertation: I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this dissertation. This is a true copy of the dissertation, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authorize Ryerson University to lend this dissertation to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize Ryerson University to reproduce this dissertation by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I understand that my dissertation may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract: “This is for Fighting, This is for Fun”: Popular Hollywood Combat (War) Films from the First Gulf War to the Present (1990-2015) Andrea Marie Schofield Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Culture, 2016 Ryerson University and York University Hollywood has been making war movies since it began making movies. Widely credited as the first ‘Blockbuster,’ and one of the first films to establish Hollywood narrative techniques and conventions, D.W. -
Torrey Peters Has Written the Trans Novel Your Book Club Needs to Read Now P.14
Featuring 329 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXIX, NO. 1 | 1 JANUARY 2021 REVIEWS Torrey Peters has written the trans novel your book club needs to read now p.14 Also in the issue: Lindsay & Lexie Kite, Jeff Mack, Ilyasah Shabazz & Tiffany D. Jackson from the editor’s desk: New Year’s Reading Resolutions Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas As a new year begins, many people commit to strict diets or exercise regimes # Chief Executive Officer or vow to save more money. Book nerd that I am, I like to formulate a series MEG LABORDE KUEHN of “reading resolutions”—goals to help me refocus and improve my reading [email protected] Editor-in-Chief experience in the months to come. TOM BEER Sometimes I don’t accomplish all that I hoped—I really ought to have [email protected] Vice President of Marketing read more literature in translation last year, though I’m glad to have encoun- SARAH KALINA [email protected] tered Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults (translated by Ann Goldstein) Managing/Nonfiction Editor and Juan Pablo Villalobos’ I Don’t Expect Anyone To Believe Me (translated by ERIC LIEBETRAU Daniel Hahn)—but that isn’t exactly the point. [email protected] Fiction Editor Sometimes, too, new resolutions form over the course of the year. Like LAURIE MUCHNICK many Americans, I sought out more work by Black writers in 2020; as a result, [email protected] Tom Beer Young Readers’ Editor books by Claudia Rankine, Les and Tamara Payne, Raven Leilani, Deesha VICKY SMITH [email protected] Philyaw, and Randall Kenan were among my favorites of the year. -
Military Geography, Militarism's Geographies
page 1 Chapter One Military Geography, Militarism’s Geographies Military Geographies are Everywhere I stood at the fence and looked in through the wire. On the other side lay a broad strip of grass. A little further on and to the left, sat red-and white- painted wooden baffle boards, mounted with lights. Further on from that, the dull, grey strip of runway stretched off into the distance. At the far end huddled a collection of structures and objects in shades of green, grey and black, unidentifiable from this distance. Occasional pops from rifle fire, perhaps, competed with the traffic noise from the road beside me. Crows hopped around on the empty runway. I poured a cup of coffee from my vacuum flask, watched and waited. Engine noise grew louder and then a dark blue pick-up truck with US-style police lights and a foreign number- plate came driving swiftly up the service road alongside the runway, slowing as it rounded the end, and then halting, to my right. I’d been seen, a coffee- toting speck beyond the perimeter fence at the bottom of the runway. The pick-up drove right to left in front of me, 30 m distant, two beret-topped heads swivelled in my direction, watching me as I watched them. The truck drove on to the baffle boards, executed a quick three-point turn and came back, left to right. It paused, watching. Another three-point turn, another traverse in front of me, another pause, engine running. I drank my coffee and ate a chocolate bar, wrapper stowed carefully in my pocket (the sign in a nearby lay-by, where I had parked, warned ‘Civic Amenities Act 1967 No Litter Penalty £100’). -
Global Wars and Writing Warrior Culture: Disclosure Interviews Anthony Swofford
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Volume 13 Pangaea Article 8 4-15-2004 Global Wars and Writing Warrior Culture: disClosure interviews Anthony Swofford Anna Froula University of Kentucky Danny Mayer University of Kentucky Jonathan Vincent University of Kentucky Keith Woodward University of Arizona DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.13.08 Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure Part of the English Language and Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Froula, Anna; Mayer, Danny; Vincent, Jonathan; and Woodward, Keith (2004) "Global Wars and Writing Warrior Culture: disClosure interviews Anthony Swofford," disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 13 , Article 8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.13.08 Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol13/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. Questions about the journal can be sent to [email protected] Durlabh Singh nr a Froula, Danny Mayer, Jonathan Vincent, and Sonnet Two ei h Woodward h bal Wars and Writing Warrior Culture: i ~ Closure interviews Anthony Swofford Would not I carry my rugged pride Anthony Swofford is Assistant Professor of When element to element will mingle and reside English at Saint Mary's College of California. In perfumed consummati on of interstellar space J li fi r t book, Jarhead: A Marine 's Chronicle of In a new planet cast out of Brahama's rage the Gulf War and Other Ball/es, is a memoir For ever wishing my nibbled pen could trace detailing his experiences as a marine sniper dur A line of haughty verse to silence the deadly state ing and after the first Gul f War. -
Reemerging Political Geography in Japan
Japanese Journal of Human Geography 64―6(2012) Reemerging Political Geography in Japan YAMAZAKI Takashi Osaka City University TAKAGI Akihiko Kyushu University KITAGAWA Shinya Mie University KAGAWA Yuichi The University of Shiga Prefecture Abstract The Political Geography Research Group (PGRG) of the Human Geographical Society of Japan was established in 2011 to promote political geographic studies in Japan. The PGRG is the very first research unit on political geography in the Society which was established in 1948. Political geography was once one of the weakest sub―fields in Japanese geography with a very limited number of scholars and published works. This, however, is not at all the case now. Political geography is a reemerging field in Japan. In this review paper, four of the PGRG members contribute chapters on general trends in Japanese political geography, legacies of Japanese wartime geopolitics, the introduction of “new geopolitics” into Japan, and geographical studies on environmental movements. All of them have confirmed with confidence that Japanese political geography has been reemerging and making steady progress in terms of theory, methodology, and case study since the 1980s. Although the current stage of Japanese political geography is still in the regenerative phase, they strongly believe that political geography should be firmly embedded in Japanese geography. Key words : political geography, Japanese geopolitics, new geopolitics, environmental movements, Japan I Introduction The Political Geography Research Group (PGRG) of the Human Geographical Society of Japan was established in 2011 to promote political geographic studies in Japan. The PGRG is the very first research unit on political geography in the Society which was established in 1948. -
The Politics of Political Geography
1 The Politics of Political Geography Guntram H. Herb INTRODUCTION case of political geography, the usual story is of a heyday characterized by racism, imperialism, and ‘La Géographie, de nouveau un savoir politique’ war in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, (Geography: once again a political knowledge). followed by a period of stagnation and decline in the 1950s, and finally a Phoenix-like revival (Lacoste, 1984) that started in the late 1960s and now seems to be coming to a lackluster end with the cooptation This statement by the chief editor of Hérodote, of key issues of ‘politics’ and ‘power’ by other intended to celebrate the politicization of French sub-disciplines of geography. However, as David geography through the journal in the 1970s and Livingstone has pointed out so aptly, the history of 1980s, also, and paradoxically, captures a profound geography, and by extension, political geography, dilemma of contemporary political geography. If, cannot be reduced to a single story (Livingstone, as a recent academic forum showed, the political 1995). There are many stories and these stories is alive and well in all of geography, does this not are marked by discontinuities and contestations, in question the continued relevance and validity of other words, ‘messy contingencies’, which compli- having a separate sub-field of political geography cate things (Livingstone, 1993: 28). (Cox and Low, 2003)? The most fruitful response A further problem is what one should include to such existential questions about academic sub- under the rubric ‘political geography’: publica- disciplines is delving into the past and tracing the tions of scholars, the work of professional academic genesis of the subject. -
On War Alex Vernon
On War Alex Vernon Can William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) be considered war literature? It does not take place on a battlefield or a wartime home front. There are no soldiers, veterans, or their loved ones. There are not even any adults. Whether the novel is more informed by Golding’s time living in cramped quarters as a British seaman during the World War II or by his years in a claustrophobic classroom teaching restless boys is unstated. Golding’s novel, about boys stranded on an island whose efforts at peaceful social organization collapse, is a popular classroom text be- cause of, among other reasons, its provocative hobbesian argument about humans as base, warring creatures. At its wonderfully teachable and devastating finale, when the boys are saved from their natural sav- agery by mature adults (representative of nurturing civilization), in the form of a warship, no less, a teacher might write and underline “irony” on the board. Thus, Golding seems to weigh in on the topic Azar Gat calls “the first and most commonly asked question when people pon- der the enigma of war,” the question of the connection between war and human nature. Throughout the ages, historians, philosophers, an- thropologists, scientists, psychologists, politicians, theologians, public intellectuals, and military leaders have wrestled with the connection between war and human nature, as have poets, memoirists, diarists, dramatists, letter writers, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers, blog- gers, and video-game makers. Whether or not video games, with their open-ended story lines, will one day be recognized alongside such texts as the Iliad (c. -
Jarhead Potential Implications for the Australian Labour Market
Jarhead and Deskilling and the Military: Potential Implications for the Australian Labour Market Author Townsend, Keith, B. Charles, Michael Published 2008 Journal Title Australian Bulletin of Labour Copyright Statement © 2008 Australian Bulletin of Labour. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/20328 Link to published version http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Australian+Bulletin+of+Labour-p2332 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au 64 ABL Vol 34 No 1 2008 Contributed Article Jarhead and Deskilling in the Military: Potential Implications for the Australian Labour Market Keith Townsend* and Michael B. Charles** Abstract This paper uses a popular culture medium to examine the notion of deskilling in one particular sector, viz., the military. Jarhead was released to cinemas in 2005 and follows the experiences of United States Marine, Anthony Swofford, in the fi rst Gulf War of the early 1990s. We witness the central character undergo intensive training to become one of the Marine’s highly skilled employees – a sniper. We observe Swofford and his colleagues’ increasing frustrations with their inability to ‘ply their trade’. While the sniper was a highly skilled, indeed élite, fi ghter in earlier confl icts, technological developments have left this skilled artisan as a bystander in modern set-piece warfare. This paper adds to our understanding of the tensions between traditional skilled occupations and technological development, in addition to the tensions between military skills and non-military employment. -
A Critical Geopolitics of Observant Practice at British Military Airshows
A critical geopolitics of observant practice at British military airshows Matthew F Rech This paper demonstrates how visual cultures of militarism take shape as part of a ‘thick’ geopolitics of being-in- place. It draws on historical accounts of, and empirical observations at, British military airshows, which it interprets via the concept of ‘observant practice’. The paper argues that the imaginative and rhetorical force of military spectacle and popular militarism are tied to its markedly enclavic spatiality, i.e. to seeing and doing in-place. By taking seriously the spatial and sensory experience of British airshows, the paper extends recent work in critical geopolitics that questions the spatialised politics of experience, and brings them into dialogue with cultural geographies of tourism. It provides a brief history of the spectacular origins of aviation and of the use of airshows to the practice of statecraft, and demonstrates how airshows are an important element in the cultural phenomenon of militarisation. The paper takes forward debates around ‘the vision thing’ in critical geopolitics by illustrating why the notion of observant practice should not be dissociated from consideration of the spaces in and through which militaries become the object of visual curiosity. It expands, therefore, the potential of observant practice as a critique of popular military cultures. Key words Britain; critical geopolitics; visual culture; observant practice; militarism; militarisation School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE1 7RU Emails: [email protected]; [email protected] Revised manuscript received 25 June 2015 political and geographical philosophy centred, practi- Introduction cally and metaphorically, on the eye results in the Since the publication of O Tuathail’s (1996a) Critical sorts of visions of the world – ‘world stages’, ‘global geopolitics, debates around the visual have figured views’ – pivotal to the practical geopolitics of empire, strongly in critical studies of geopolitics. -
Careers and Professional Development Sessions 2019 Annual Meeting of the AAG
Careers and Professional Development Sessions 2019 Annual Meeting of the AAG WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3 Making the Better Teacher: Pre-Service Training and Current Teachers’ Professional Development Welcome to the AAG 4:30 – 6:10 pm in Johnson, Marriott, Mezzanine Level 8:00 – 9:40 am in Wilson B, Marriott, Mezzanine Level Sponsored by Geography Education Specialty Group, Community Sponsored by Graduate Student Affinity Group, Careers and College Affinity Group, Careers and Professional Development Professional Development, American Association of Geographers Student Networking Social 4:30 – 6:10 pm in Ballroom Salon 1, Marriott, Lobby Level Career Mentoring A Sponsored by the American Association of Geographers, Careers and 9:55 – 11:35 am in Wilson B, Marriott, Mezzanine Level Professional Development Sponsored by Careers and Professional Development THURSDAY, APRIL 4 Working Abroad: International Career Opportunities for Alcohol and the Academy Geographers 8:00 – 9:40 am in Wilson B, Marriott, Mezzanine Level 12:40 – 2:20 pm in Wilson B, Marriott, Mezzanine Level Sponsored by Political Geography Specialty Group, Graduate Student Sponsored by Careers and Professional Development Affinity Group, Harassment-Free AAG Initiative, Careers and Professional Development W1_8 Do Human Geographers Need Computational Thinking Skills Geography Teacher Training and Proficiency in Geography Education 12:40 – 2:20 pm in Wilson C, Marriott, Mezzanine Level 8:00 – 9:40 am in Wilson A, Marriott, Mezzanine Level Sponsored by Careers and Professional Development -
Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20131017020648/http://www.indigocafe.com/columns/article.php?c=62 Member List | Your Shopping Bag | Your Account Welcome, Guest! (sign in) *** WE ARE CLOSED. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE. *** Become an Affiliate Suggest A Book Gift Certificates Jenn's Blog: A Bookseller's Tale Frequent Buyer Card About us Help Book Review Jarhead Advertisement A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford Reviewer: Geoff Wisner, Staff Reviewer Posted: October 31, 2005 Jarhead will soon be released as a Major Motion Picture. Previews for the film, which looked pretty good, prompted me to pick up the memoir that it's based on. After serving in the Marine Corps as a scout and sniper, Anthony Swofford attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his book shows some of the marks of the writing- school graduate: present tense, terse sentences, startling word choices (the night sky in the Mojave Desert is “wracked with stars”), and epiphanies that are sometimes too laboriously worked up. At times Swofford wants you know he's a tough Marine, and at others that he's a sensitive literary guy. Digging foxholes in the sand reminds him of Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes. Still, inconsistency and self-consciousness are understandable in the memoir of a young man: especially when that young man was sent, like so many, to do battle in alien lands when he was barely out of high school. Swofford's insecurities make his story absorbing, and he doesn't spare himself when describing a bar brawl after a friend's funeral, or having his mother iron a Marine Corps decal onto his T-shirt when he was a boy, or what it feels like to piss on yourself when you experience your first rocket attack. -
Geography and Engagement with the Military: Issues, Status, Findings
AAG Geography and Military Study Committee Final Report on Geography and Engagement with the Military: Issues, Status, Findings Submitted to the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Council February 27, 2019 Committee members: Andrea Brunelle, Susan Cutter (Chair), Roger Downs, Chris Hair, Andrew Lohman, Adam Moore, Tom Mote, Geraldine Pratt, Sue Roberts, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Rickie Sanders, and Dan Shrubsole. Geography and Engagement with the Military: Issues, Status, Findings By AAG Geography and Military Study Committee1 I. Introduction From the imperial conquests of the past to the high-tech warfare of the twenty-first century, there is a long history of engagement between geographers and the military (Woodward, 2004, 2005, 2017; Galgano and Palka, 2011). While geography has played a significant role in supporting military and intelligence activities (Barnes and Farish, 2006; Barnes, 2016), there is also a strong tradition of anti-militarist sentiment in the discipline, which has called into question the complicity of geography in promoting military agendas (Gregory, 2011; Bryan 2016). Although the historical associations between geography and the military are longstanding, the level of engagement between geographers and the U.S. military and intelligence communities has increased considerably in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereafter, 9/11). The military’s growing interest and engagement with the academic discipline of geography has occurred at a time when the role of the U.S. military is itself changing. Traditional strategies of boots on the ground have given way to counterinsurgency warfare with advanced technology, escalating defense budgets that are not sustainable, the dropping of gender restrictions for duty, the increasing use of special operations forces, and the mounting need for post-service medical and mental health care for veterans (Christian Science Monitor, 2011).