The UC Irvine School of Humanities has received a $175,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce “Documenting War,” a year-long “Sawyer Seminar” that will explore the genres, rhetoric, and real effects of wartime documentation and postwar reflection, as carried out by journalists, soldiers, civilians, and artists in verbal, visual and mixed media forms. The seminar will begin in fall 2016 and will be led by project co-directors Carol Burke, professor of English, and Cecile Whiting, Chancellor’s Professor of art history. UCI is one of 11 universities to receive this prestigious grant in 2015.
The Mellon Foundation established Sawyer Seminars grants in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The grant will support a series of open lectures and workshops during the academic year, a post-doctoral position, and two graduate student pre-doctoral fellowships.
“Documenting War” builds upon the UCI School of Humanities’ strong foundation of war studies: Humanities Core, a year-long cross-disciplinary humanities course taken by students across the UCI campus, has taken war as its triennial theme; beginning last fall, the school sponsored a year-long faculty research group on war; and the school has recently held two large conferences on war. The Sawyer Seminar will expand the number of UCI faculty and graduate students participating in conversations on the representation of war and will take the discussion to the next level of regional, national, and international visibility and impact by including prominent visitors to share in research exchange.
“Under the leadership of Carol Burke and Cecile Whiting, our Sawyer Seminar will bring scholars into conversation with journalists and military personnel for what we expect to be lively, bilateral conversations in which prejudices can be exposed and new resources for understanding conflict, narration, and memory can be tested,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities. “This seminar couldn’t come at a more important time as we commemorate the significant anniversaries of various wars— World Wars One and Two and the end of the Vietnam War.”
Here, Carol Burke and Cecile Whiting give us insight into their research and what they hope to accomplish with the seminar.
What are you hoping to accomplish with this seminar?
Cecile: Our seminar, which grew out of a year-long research residency in the School of Humanities on war, proposes to bring together academic scholars, military personnel and journalists in order to analyze the ways in which documents produced in the heat of battles and those produced in hindsight both complement and contradict each other in the formation of lasting memories of armed conflict.
Carol: The effort to document a war or even a single event in a war is an effort to construct meaning out of the ruins of death and destruction. The images we produce and the stories we tell about war will always be influenced by our proximity in time and space to the events and by our roles in the conflict. Consider, for example, the different perspectives of the photojournalist who gets close enough to the action to produce a compelling picture of combat versus the reporter who rarely leaves the safety of the Green Zone; the foot soldier who hoists his buddy onto that Blackhawk that’s swooped in to extract the wounded and the dead versus the commander watching the firefight transmitted digitally back to headquarters; or the civilians in every war caught in the crossfire versus the historians who analyze wars decades, even centuries after the treaties have been signed and hostilities ended.
We trust that this Sawyer Seminar will allow us to engage in conversations with other scholars, with journalists, and with artists about how war is given meaning.
Cecile, you’ve been researching the ways in which artists in the 1950s and early 1960s recalled World War Two some ten to fifteen years after its conclusion, just at a moment when the United States embarked on another foreign war in Vietnam. Why did you gravitate to this project and what has been surprising or most meaningful to you thus far about your findings?
In pursuing research on Pop artists active in NYC and LA during the 1960s, I was struck by the number of references these artists made to World War Two, the Cold War, and fears of nuclear bombs. Further, I discovered a host of artists, both young and old, who referenced these topics during the 1950s, a period when artists were supposedly quiescent, more concerned with personal expression than world politics. It turns out that despite the fact that World War Two has over the years earned the reputation as the last “good war,” when Americans enthusiastically rallied around a common cause and claimed the higher moral ground to defeat a patently evil enemy, many American artists in the post-war period expressed doubts about the conflict and grappled with the catastrophic consequences of the American government’s decision to carpet bomb many German cities such as Dresden, and to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Until the mid-1960s when many turned their attention to the Vietnam war, American artists responded in visual terms both to the responsibility they felt for the death, destruction, and suffering caused by bombings in World War Two and to their worry about the threat of nuclear catastrophe in the future.
Carol, you have embedded with combat units and observed members of military in garrison. How has this impacted your research and research interests?
No detail of military life—even as minor as a haircut, the pitch of a sailor’s white cap, or the chants sung out in basic training—is without significance, whether its meaning is imposed from above or smuggled into the barracks or onto the parade ground by the grunts and common sailors. Like any occupational folk group, members of the military distinguish themselves not only by the jobs they do but by the rituals they share, the anecdotes they exchange, even the slang that lards their everyday conversation. For the past twenty-five years I have documented a military culture as it has slowly adjusted to women and now openly gay and trans gender fellow soldiers, sailors, Marines, and officers.
In December 2008 and January 2009, I embedded with a combat unit in Iraq, hitching a ride onto every convoy going “outside the wire” that would take me along. In 2010-11, I took a leave from my teaching post at UCI to embed with two combat units in Afghanistan. It was on that extended deployment that I saw how the U.S. Army conducts a war of counterinsurgency. Only by spending time with deployed soldiers can one see how they go about their daily lives “down range.”
In all of my work on military culture, I tend to consider the details of soldiers lives that are not often reported: the good luck charms they take to war with them, the sealed letters they leave on a bureau or in a desk drawer with the message scrawled on the front, “To be opened in the event of my death,” and the sexual activity on today’s forward operating bases.
Cecile, what do your take as the focus of your research on the aftermath of war?
I take as my subject the various artists who adopted oblique visual languages not only to refer to the wounded body, the devastated landscape, and the obliterated city, but also to cope with the increased role of the still camera, eye-witness testimony, and historical artifacts in claiming to truthfully document and commemorate the realities of World War Two. Having written my first book, Antifascism in American Art, on the ways in which American artists responded to the threat of fascism, I find myself now returning, some 25 years later to the topic of World War Two but from a retrospective vantage in order to examine how artists commemorated the war and at the same time questioned the ability of the image to document the destructive effects of war-time bombings.
Carol, you plan on facilitating a conversation between journalists and military personnel with academics. Why is this type of conversation important?
Journalists read the work of scholars, and scholars read the accounts of journalists; but they rarely have the opportunity to discuss with each other how they document war. We think that this discussion could be made even more interesting by enlarging it to include those public affairs officers and Department of Defense historians tasked with writing the internal daily press releases and the unit histories of a conflict.
Carol, you are currently working on the ways in which acute visual technology like night vision and surveillance balloons hoisted above remote bases affect our views of combat. Would you give us some insight into what you’re finding?
My last book, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight, has a chapter on fighting the digital war. As part of my research for that chapter, I interviewed several scientists and engineers designing technology for future wars. On the one hand, this is technology like the drone intended to conduct surveillance and drop bombs without risk to the pilots who fly them. On the other hand, it’s technology like the exoskeleton that can allow the ground soldier to carry a 200-pound pack, a rifle that can see around the sides of buildings, and a chip, implanted in the infantry soldier, that continually reports every soldier’s vital signs back to headquarters. I was struck not only by how indebted to science fiction literature and film these inventions were but how they demanded a radical rethinking of the ordinary grunt as a Twenty First Century cyborg.
By spending time with troops deployed in the Iraq and Afghan wars, I have seen first hand the impressive high tech equipment they bring with them to fight enemies armed with Kalasnikov rifles and improvised explosives. It is important to be mindful of the ways in which our war technology frames how we understand the war we are fighting and how it can blind us to the thinking of those we oppose.
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All events and associated news regarding “Documenting War” will be posted on the Humanities Commons website. A postdoctoral call for applications will be posted in August.