Visual Conflicts: On the Formation of Political Memory in the History of Art and Visual Cultures

This collection of essays explores ways in which visual cultures have engaged with armed conflict and politically-motivated acts of violence of all types. It works out of analytical frameworks developed in the fields of Art History and Visual Culture in order to address the politics of representing conflict within and beyond these disciplines. The contributors seek to extend perceived well-established academic approaches to thinking about visual production in the context of war, conflict, and militarism through a study of various themes, including historiography, subjectivity, biography, narrative construction, commemoration, identity, and memory formation. Each author considers how visual representations of conflict shape the meanings of politically significant events, of specific social formations, of subject positions and enacted roles. The volume investigates a set of representational regimes in visual media, including print-making, painting, photography and digital imaging, and the use to which they have been put to generate as well as mediate realities of conflict.