[Commlist] New book: War Faces on Screen

Mani King Sharpe is delighted to announce that /_War Faces on Screen 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/war-faces-on-screen-9798765129234/>: 
Photography, Film and the Politics of Representation_/ (Bloomsbury), a 
collection of essays that I co-edited with Professor Katy Parry 
(University of Leeds), is out now. See below for more details.

*Summary:*
How have images of the face been used to document and distort the 
phenomenon of war? Such is the question that drives this book, with the 
face forming a recurring - almost ubiquitous - motif throughout visual 
depictions of military conflict.**At once interdisciplinary, 
transnational, and transhistorical, /War Faces on Screen/ is organised 
into three sections. Section One examines representations of the face in 
war photography, illustrating how photographers have visualised the 
invisible violence of psychic trauma. Ethical and political concerns are 
at the forefront of each essay, from the advocacy work of portraiture, 
to AI tools capable of generating a range of aesthetically convincing 
yet potentially discriminatory images. Section Two focuses on the 
aesthetics of the cinematic close-up, drone vision, and how the 
selective digital colourisation of bodies and faces from archival 
footage works to impose a moral hierarchy. Section Three concludes the 
book with a focus on colonisation, decolonisation and defacement, 
extending earlier discussions of the imperial violence found in recent 
Hollywood films, where empathy is displaced from the ethnic other to the 
suffering Western soldier. Our final chapters chart how the face is 
central to articulating the meaning and sentiment of colonial and civil 
wars, with even seemingly progressive documentaries perpetuating unequal 
power dynamics and problematic notions of victimhood. Foregrounding the 
work of artists and practitioners, alongside theoretical frameworks, 
/War Faces on Screen/ ultimately forms a radically innovative 
contribution to the study of image-making and war-making.

*Contents:*
Introduction: War Faces on Screen
/Mani Sharpe (University of Leeds, UK)/

*Part 1: Photographing Faces of War*
1. Now You See Them, Now You Don't: A Photographic series of Afghan 
Interpreters and Veteran Advocates in the Aftermath of the War in 
Afghanistan (2001-2021)
/Sara de Jong (University of York, UK) and Andy Barnham (Photographer, UK)/
2. /Faces of War/: An Interview with Alexander Chekmenev
/Mani Sharpe (University of Leeds, UK) and Kseniia Lazareva (University 
of Leeds, UK)/
3. Sentimentalizing Trauma: Ways of Seeing War Faces in Visual Generative AI
/Katy Parry (University of Leeds, UK) and Giorgia Aiello (University of 
Milan, Italy)/

*Part 2: Cinematic Close-ups and Drone Vision*
4. The Face, Combat Trauma and the Other in /Apocalypse Now/
/Guy Westwell (Queen Mary University of London, UK)/
5. Pathos Signals in the Contemporary American War Film: The Transfer of 
Affect
/Robert Burgoyne (Writer, UK)/
6. Target Confirmed: Drone Visuality, Dehumanization, and the Weeping 
Soldier in /Eye in the Sky/
/Alex Adams (Independent Scholar)/
7. Attending the Dead: Digital Colourization, Injury and the First World 
War Archive
/Liz Watkins (University of Leeds, UK)/

*Part 3: Colonization, Decolonization and Defacement*
8. The War Face Off-Screen: Catalogue Descriptions, Imperial 
Interpellations, and Reading On- and Off-Screen Faces in British Boer 
War Films
/Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal (University of St Andrews, UK)/
9. In Defence of Facelessness: Opacity in Trinh T. Minh-ha's 
Documentaries /Surname Viet Given Name Nam/ (1989) and /Shoot for the 
Contents/ (1992)
/Leonie Gschwendtberger (University of Bristol, UK)/
10. Screening the Faces and Non-Faces of War: A Political Physiognomy
/Mangalika de Silva (New York University, USA)/


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