Publisher's Synopsis
Do the relentless media images of the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq convey a tangible picture of the human reality involved? Do they obstruct rather than bring into view the post-9/11 world? Gertrude Stein wrote of her experiences in World War II under the heading of Wars I Have Seen; in her answer, Wars I Have (Not) Seen,Rosalind C. Morris describes a world in which our everyday is insistently sealed off from the fact of war, despite the prevalence of media imagery.
Gathered here are essays that Morris has been writing since the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In these works, she explores the relationship between war, the war on terror, and the mass media, and she reflects on transformations in the understanding and representation of the war throughout the last decade. Wars I Have (Not) Seen explores the technological structures that bind play and war in an uncomfortable imitation of each other, and Morris traces appearances of war in contemporary culture. Trenchant and reasoned, these essays insist that we must look beyond our daily media dosage to fully understand the human and political dynamics being reconfigured today on a global scale.
