IN VISUAL CULTURE Henrike Lehnguth, Docto

ABSTRACT

Title of Document: INTO THE DARK CHAMBER OF TERROR: “THE WAR ON TERROR” IN VISUAL CULTURE

Henrike Lehnguth, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011

Directed By: Professor Nancy Struna, Department of American Studies

This dissertation analyzes fiction film representations of the “global war on

terror” under special consideration of the ways in which visual representations have

mediated the space that novelist J. M. Coetzee so aptly called the “dark chamber” and

that I, building on Coetzee, term the dark chamber of terror where, away from bare view, ethical norms, and the regulatory structures of the law, the state and rivaling non-state powers like the al-Qaeda organization exert unchecked control and (lethal) violence over the bodies of those whom they perceive as ‘problem’ or ‘enemy’ subjects. I approach the visual representations of the dark chamber of terror in fiction film with an argument that they engage in different types of what I term visioning practices that each emerge out of a different relationship between the actual violent event that took place and its initial visual mediation in nonfictional terms. I differentiate between en-visioning practices , where fictional images fill the visual void left by the absence of actual recorded images from the dark chamber; re-

visioning practices , where fictional images rewrite actual visual recordings of the dark chamber from an oppositional standpoint that strives to undermine the original narratives and meanings; and dis-visioning practices, an ambivalent form of re-

visioning, where fictional images engage the dark chamber and prior visual

representations of the dark chamber but negate their full implication. By way of these

visioning practices I present a systematic approach to the study of fictional

representations in relation to the “global war on terror” and unpack narrative and

visual patterns that arise across different film texts. I argue that among recurring

visual and narrative patterns are gender representations that associate men with

heroically defiant actions in the public arena and women with passive suffering in the

domestic space. They also involve storylines that tie heroics and suffering almost

unequivocally to the Unites States and its people. Together these and other narrative

patterns construct the representational scope of the space that stands at the center of

what terror partially encapsulates in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

INTO THE DARK CHAMBER OF TERROR: “THE WAR ON TERROR” IN VISUAL CULTURE

Henrike Lehnguth

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011

Advisory Committee: Professor Nancy Struna, Chair Professor Caroline Eades Professor Mary Sies Professor Madeline Zilfi Professor Peter Beicken

Foreword

May 1, 2011: As I am finalizing this dissertation I learn that today, the day that I have come more or less to an end with the project (at least in its dissertation form) that

Osama bin Laden is said to have been killed. In the light of his death and the topic at hand, I would like to begin with the last stances of a poem by Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad, whose words, to me, represent an ethical stand in the face of the ugliness that is the dark chamber of terror:

affirm life. affirm life. we got to carry each other now. you are either with life, or against it. affirm life.

- Suheir Hammad, “First Writing Since,” 2001

Acknowledgements

Where to begin, when I am indebted to so many encounters with people, books, and ideas that long precede the specificities of this project but have, nevertheless, been vital to its realization? While this project would never