Mythologizing the Vietnam War: Visual Culture and Mediated Memory Subject: Cultural Studies Editor(s): Jennifer Good, Paul Lowe, Brigitte Lardinois, Val Williams Pages: 195 ISBN: 978-1-4438-5442-9 Publication Date: 2014 Format: Hardcover Availability: In Stock List Price in USD: $51.89 Dr. Jennifer Good is Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. Paul Lowe is an award-winning photographer, who has covered breaking news the world over, working in 82 countries over the last 25 years. Brigite Lardinois is Deputy Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts London. Val Williams is a writer, curator and Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the London College of Communication. Cambridge Scholars Publishing offers readers the extraordinary opportunity to read substantial portions of their books at no charge. To read the Introduction, and Chapter 1, please click here). Cambridge Scholars Publishing is offering readers of the LSS Newsletter a 20% discount off the list price. Simply use the offer code "LSSVIETNAM" at check-out to receive this special discount. For information on ordering, click here.

This collection of interdisciplinary critical essays explores the cultural legacies of the US involvement in South East Asia, considering this process of ‘mythologizing’ through the lenses of visual media and tracing the war’s evolution from contemporary reportage to subsequent interpretation and consumption. It reassesses the role of visual media in covering and remembering the war, its memorialization, mediation and memory.

From Chapter One: “Violent Representation: Photographs, Soldiers, and an Ideological War.” Jeremy Kreusch

By the close of the Vietnam War in 1975, several photographs had helped to serve what became a national cause in the United States: the anti-war movement. Many of those photographs pictured the brutality and violence engendered by Americans and their allies in the jungles of Vietnam. Powerful images as they were, they produced similarly powerful sentiments. The photographs themselves were not created as propaganda, yet they were usurped to serve an ideology.

I argue that the soldier is trapped in the bind of being the embodiment of war; of acting as metonymy when photographed and therefore masking the systems and figures that shape and initiate war, whether presented and received as a perpetrator or presented and received sympathetically. In conclusion, I elaborate on some of the problems and paradoxes inherent in photojournalism when it functions iconically and ideologically.

Mythologizing the Vietnam War: Visual Culture and Mediated Memory

Table of Contents

List of Images
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: The State

• Chapter One
  Violent Representation: Photographs, Soldiers and an Ideological War
  Jeremy Kreusch
• Chapter Two
  Uses of the Vietnam War as a Frame of Reference in Vietnamese Media Discussion of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”
  Huong Nguyen
• Chapter Three
  Memorializing Thailand’s “Separate Victory” in the Vietnam War: An Official Argument for Triumph Made From the Losing Side
  Richard Ruth

Part II: The Screen

• Chapter Four
  The Mythologizing of the Vietnam War through the use of Rock and Roll in Film
  Peter Hope
• Chapter Five
  Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: Constructing War-Torn Vietnam in England
  Richard Daniels

Part III: The Body

• Chapter Six
  Bodily Visions of the War in Vietnam
  Madeleine Corcoran
• Chapter Seven
  Sexual Assault and the Mai Lai Massacre: The Erasure of Sexual Violence from Public Memory of the Vietnam War
  Valerie Wieskamp
• Chapter Eight
  War Dialling: Image Transmissions from Saigon
  Susan Schuppli

Postscript: A Place to Stand
List of Contributors
Index

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