5th Global Conference
Session 7: Responses and Representations of the Trauma of War
Chair: Andrew Wilson
Censorship, Propaganda and the Production of “Shell Shock” in World War One
Nolen Gertz
New School for Social Research, USA
In discussing warfare we tend to maintain a theoretical cleavage between the “home front” and the “battle front” that is supposed to parallel the physical distance that separates them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the academic literature that surrounds World War I, with each discipline for decades having studied its correspondent aspect of the war. While this has provided us with incredibly detailed research into the minutiae of battles and the changing attitudes of the masses, it has done little to help us combine these details into a full-scale picture of what was actually experienced by civilians and soldiers alike. Therefore this paper will instead attempt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this war by looking at the alarmism that helped lead to the war and the censorship and propaganda campaigns that helped shape it. Thus it will be shown that only by returning to the concerted efforts of politicians and journalists years before the war can we see how the “war to end all war” eventually led to the creation of “shell shock” and the loss of a generation.
Download Draft Conference Paper - 
Entertainment and Understanding: The Evolving Role of Movies in the Combat Zone
Elizabeth Coble
Defense Intelligence Agency, USA
U.S. military personnel in wars past had access to movies, but because of technological and transportation limitations, movies were slow to arrive in combat zones. They were shown in makeshift theaters to groups of troops. Through the evolution of technology, all personnel in today’s combat zones have easy access to movies and digital video device (DVD) players. Movie watching could be group activity, or it could be a very personal way of escaping from the reality of the war. Any tent, trailer, or vehicle could become a soldier’s personal movie theater.
In today’s combat zones, soldiers bring their DVD players and movies with them. They swap movies with their friends. DVDs are available from multiple other sources, including care packages sent from home, buying them in U.S. military shopping facilities, or buying illegally-produced DVDs that are sold by concessionaires on most U.S. camps. First-run U.S. movies are often available about two weeks after they are released in the U.S.A. This quick turn around of new movies give personnel a stronger sense of “home.”
In addition to their entertainment value, movies were also used to educate U.S. military personnel – to give context, understanding, and insight into the mission at hand.
From June 2004 to November 2005, I served two tours in a combat zone. During these two tours, I experienced first hand how the roles and uses of movies can shape and define the modern experience of war. This paper will discuss the roles of movies and their impact on the U.S. military experience in modern war. It will describe how movies were used for entertainment, both individually and collectively. The paper will also describe how popular culture military movies were usedto educate - to provide understanding and context to soldiers.
The Correspondent’s Experience of War
Tim Markham
Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom
This paper addresses two key aspects of the journalistic representation of war: the multi-layered determination of the war correspondent subjectivity, and the production of knowledge about war as a social phenomenon. The first aspect draws on theories of embodiment to determine the parameters of the phenomenology of war correspondence, looking in particular at the epistemological relationship war reporters have with their journalistic objects, the authorial voice with which they constitute their professional subjectivity, and their internalisation and naturalisation of professional and cultural norms. The second aspect starts with the claim that war correspondence is a field of cultural production, and examines the determinants of cultural consecration in this arena. Specifically, it establishes the systematically misrecognised symbolic economies underpinning fields of war, and assesses the role played by gender and generation. The paper draws on interviews with war correspondents and other actors active in the field – military personnel and PR, newspaper editors and a government spokesperson – and it presents the results of a discourse analysis which coded interviews according to primary (overt) and secondary (latent) symbolic efficacy. It assesses the extent to which ideas of professionalism and ethics in war reporting can be taken to be honourable, or if they should, after Bourdieu, be regarded as purely strategic. It also asks to what extent the self-reflexivity of the war correspondent can be interpreted as authentic, or whether the phenomenological experience of war by the professional journalist is instead determined by field position, differential distinctions between groups of actors, the reporter’s socioeconomic background and the geography of conflict. The paper ends by suggesting that while there is a case for defending journalistic self-reflexivity, the dissemination of the experience of war is inevitably overdetermined by the contingencies of news production and reception.