Cultures of Militarization

Special Issue of TOPIA

Edited by Jody Berland, Blake Fitzpatrick

This special issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studiesaddresses the ubiquity of militarization, a presence that is woven into the very fabric of civic culture. Militarization is not just something that happens in war zones; when our government invests billions of dollars in war planes, prisons and the “digital economy,” while starving resources in social justice, education, the environment and culture, we are living the consequences of global militarization. To talk about cultures of militarization is to talk about the terms in which collective identity is militarized and resistive forms of agency allowed and disallowed.

By recognizing the human relations within capitalism and how these have come to be defined increasingly by military interests, we reveal that militarism is a global master narrative; military diction becomes inseparable from the language of power, sweeping aside human suffering as mere “collateral damage.” We are led to believe that it is temporary, and we are compliant in our acceptance of these narratives.

Cultures of Militarization, edited by Jody Berland (York University) and Blake Fitzpatrick (Ryerson University), is a broad discussion by twenty-two international scholars and artists whose work investigates the processes through which military presence is normalized or critiqued in private, public and national narratives. The relationship between militarism and civic culture pushes us beyond a static binary to reveal several dynamically related terms and issues.

The collection is not a move to summarize militarism into a finite set of conceptual terms, but rather offers evidence of the tangential, broad, insidious and revealed presence of militarization throughout culture.

Contents

·      Memorial: Barbara Godard

·      Introduction: Cultures of Militarization and the Military-Cultural Complex (Jody Berland and Blake Fitzpatrick)

Articles

·      Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round Public Discourse, National Identity and the War:     Neoliberal Militarization and the Yellow Ribbon Campaign in Canada (A. L. McCready)

·         Searching for the Militarization of Canadian Culture: The Rise of a Military-Cultural Memory Network (Howard Fremeth)

·         Canadian and American Cultures of Militarism: Coping Mechanisms in a Military-Industrial-Service-Complex (Carole R. McKenna)

·         Fortress Europe: Globalization, Militarization and the Policing of Interior Borderlands (Uli Linke)

·         Plugging Cultural Knowledge into the U.S. Military Machine: The Neo-Orientalist Logic of Counterinsurgency (Markus Kienscherf )

·         A Corrective for Cultural Studies: Beyond the Militarization Thesis to the New Military Intelligence (Neil Balan)

·         Operation Nunalivut: Photo Essay (Erin Riley)

·         Conflict(ing) Narratives: Representations of War in The Battleground Project and the Performative Potential of Audience (Susan Cahill)

·         Tracing the Absent-Present of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America as Sensuous Encounter: Notes on (Nuclear) Ruins (Marc Lafleur)

·         Peter Jackson’s Use of Hollywood Film Genres in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and New Zealand’s anti-Nuclear Stance (Mary Alemany-Galway)

·          “Come on, let us shoot!”: WikiLeaks and the Cultures of Militarization       (Stuart Allan and Kari Andén-Papadopoulos)

·         Extraterritorial Prison Plans in the Style of IKEA and the Prison Playlist (Bill Burns)

·         Living in a Militarized Culture: War, Games and the Experience of U.S. Empire     (David A. Clearwater)

·         Mil-bot Fetishism: The Pataphysics of Military Robots (Ian Roderick)

·         Preparing the Instantaneous Battlespace: A Cultural Examination of Network-Centric Warfare (Mary Sterpka King)

·         The Terrorist Entrepreneur (Gary Genosko)

·         Fear and Spectacle on the Planet of Slums (James R. Compton)

·         Offerings

·         Forum

·         Review Essays

·         Reviews

·         Notes on Contributors

About the Authors

Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto. She has published widely on spatial and environmental themes in cultural studies. She is the author of North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (Duke University Press 2009) and editor of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

Blake Fitzpatrick is Professor and Graduate Program Director, Documentary Media (MFA) Program at Ryerson University. He is an active photographer, curator and writer whose research interests include the photographic representation of the nuclear era, the Cold War and contemporary responses to militarism.