Apologies for cross-posting
We would like to announce that an international symposium entitled
"Between War and Media" will be held at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in
Tokyo for three days between March 25 and 27, 2002, with support from the
Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies
and the Japan Foundation. Discussions will range from the historical
relationships between war and media in the twentieth century to the
issues raised about media after the September 11th attacks, so we
encourage a wide variety of participants. Papers will be presented in
English, Japanese or French, with simultaneous translation.
Inquiries:
Maison Franco-Japonaise: Hayashi Haruo (Tel: 03-5421-7641; e-mail:
[log in to unmask])
Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and Communication
Studies: Yamamoto Takuji (c/o Yoshimi Shunya office) (Tel: 03-5841-5920,
fax: 03-3811-5970, e-mail: [log in to unmask])
BETWEEN WAR AND MEDIA: International Symposium 2002
March 25-27, 2002
Maison Franco-Japonaise Hall
Hosted by the Maison Franco-Japonaise
Co-sponsored by the Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and
Communication Studies
With support from the Japan Foundation
Aim of the Symposium
The twentieth century was a century of wars. From two world wars to the
Vietnam and Gulf wars at the end of the century, armed conflict has
tended to frame the twentieth century. The desires, consciousness, and
memory of wars in this age have also been deeply entwined with the
period's media, from cinema to radio, from posters and photojournalism to
television, from recent satellite communications and the internet to the
thorough manipulation of information during the Gulf War. At the same
time, war has offered revolutionary opportunities for the development of
the media in the twentieth century. One can think of the twentieth
century as a media century, and as a century of war, with both aspects
indivisibly interrelated.
Recalling this history, one can say that the twentieth century first
opened with World War I, a total war that overturned the nineteenth
century model of limited war. Total war, as a form of conflict, caused
fundamental transformations in the social organization of the nation
state. Then World War II and its holocaust, exercised in total accordance
with the system of total war, sparked a level of self-destruction unseen
since the dawn of humanity, one that threated to upset even the basic
conviction in civilization.
War has continued to grow in the half century since the end of World War
II, from the nuclear balance of the Cold War, which multiplied the
possibilities for "overkill" of the entire human race, and the
innumerable irregular guerrilla wars in the postcolonial situation, to
the Gulf War, which reduced death to the elimination of blips on a
screen, and the bombing of Kosovo, which was discussed as if it was the
first realization of the concept of "pure" war. The media have been
deeply involved in each of these processes, just as they have
proliferated under the decisive regulation of war's metamorphoses.
Now, we are at present witnessing the ultimate combination of war and
media at the entrance to the twenty-first century. In fact, we are
possibly already "living in wartime." With the incidents on September 11,
2001, the vast majority of people are learning of developments in
America's "strike back against Afghanistan" by means of transnational
satellite media such as CNN and Al-Jazeera; at the same time, through
such media, they are able to represent this "war" for the first time.
Not only that, but it is clear that the events of September 11 were, in
the first place, planned and "performed" from the beginning with the
assumption they would be captured by television cameras. As all was being
media-ted, nearly 4000 people lost their lives in an instant.
The trends of the war that has just started are as yet unclear. Yet
there is no doubt that media will become an essential condition for
structuring our perception of the world, even if this war becomes one
fought on a global scale, or even if it presents new aspects never
conceived before. War, as a perpetually uncanny event, will drag us
towards a new horizon of perception and cognition. And media, one must
add, is steadily becoming unavoidably involved with this horizon of
perception itself.
That is not all. After the attack on the World Trade Center, a certain
funerary condition began to disseminate, centered on the mountain of
rubble that remained. Manhatten suddenly started to be described as a
"warzone," and those that died there were decorated with numerous
American flags as America's innocent dead, as heroic victims of war. The
image of airplanes slamming into high-rise buildings, like the scenes of
Kennedy assassination or the Challenger disaster--perhaps with a tension
far surpassing these--have become national images, America's memory.
This "memory of terrorism" or "memory of war" has come into being, been
manipulated, and started taking root as a new collective memory. The
genuine sorrow of people who lost relatives and loved ones has come into
conflict with actions that are trying to channel these feelings towards
techniques of national memorialization. In that, the public memory of
the incident is being created. However, one wonders how attuned people
can be to the fact that this form of mourning can also become a form of
deep cultural forgetting with regard to another set of dead.
With this conception of the issues, we plan to hold an international
symposium entitled "Between War and Media" at the Maison Franco-Japonaise
for three days between March 25 and 27, 2002, in hopes of elucidating the
historical, perceptual, critical and contemporary relationship between
war and media.
At the symposium, participants will re-address the relation between war
and media in the twentieth century from a standpoint grounded in the
conditions following the events of September 11, 2001. As a starting
point, Carol Gluck, the historian from Columbia University, will commence
the three days of discussion with a keynote address.
Next, we have organized four sessions. The first, "Images of Wars/Wars
of Images," will reinvestigate from a historical perspective the
complicated relationship between the apparatus of image media and the
event of war. Session two, "Media of Memory: Narrating the Battle
Front," will focus on war and collective memory, as well as on media as
their mediative force. In the third session, entitled "From Media Crisis
to Counter Media," participants will measure the depth of the crisis in
today's media, where globalization and nationalism, war and military
conflict intermix, and try to conceive what hope lays within such
conditions. Finally, session four, "Between War and Media," will look
back to trace how the questions posed in the keynote address were
clarified in each of the sessions, and attempt to offer some preliminary
answers. In general, after the keynote speech on the first day, the two
sessions on day two will reconsider war and media in the twentieth
century from a historical viewpoint, while the last sessions on day three
will try to develop these issues from a contemporary perspective.
In the breaks between our discussions, we plan to present film works
with a deep relation to the symposium's topic, as well as display wartime
propaganda materials from the collection of the Tokyo University
Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies.
PROGRAM
Day One: Monday, March 25, 2002
18:00-20:30
Place: Maison Franco-Japonaise Hall (same below)
Keynote Address: What's Wrong with This Picture?: War and Media in the
20th and 21st Centuries
Carol Gluck (Columbia University)
MC: Pierre Souyri, Director, Maison Franco-Japonaise
Day Two: Tuesday, March 26, 2002
10:00-13:00
Session 1: "Images of Wars/Wars of Images"
Presenter 1: Aaron Gerow (Yokohama National University)
Fighting for Viewers: Wartime Japanese Film and the Asian Audience
Presenter 2: Ikui Eikoh (Kyoritsu Women's University)
Imagining Infamy: Photographic Traumatization and the "Act of War"
Presenter 3: Helene Puiseux (Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes)
From Everyday Televisual Images to the Construction of Imaginaries
through Two Examples: the Gulf War and the Post 9/ll Conflict
Chair: Narita Ryuichi (Nihon Women's University)
Outline
If the twentieth century was a visual age, its wars were fought as much
with images as with guns. From the cinematic propaganda machine to
military controls on television news reporting, what was shown and how it
was shown was an essential part of the war to "win hearts and minds" both
within the nation and without, to construct citizens and soldiers as well
as allies and enemies. Not only were the events of September 11, 2001,
shaped by the technology covering them live, those pursuing the ensuing
war were as much concerned with Al-Jazeera as with the visualization of
Afghan targets. Yet modern image media like photography, cinema, and
television were not simply new tools for effecting the same propaganda
purposes as previous media; as Paul Virilio argues, in their apparatus
they manifested the changing logistics of the perception of space and
time in alignment with new kinds of war. This session will thus not only
consider how war and its violence have been represented in images, but
ask historically how the twentieth century media that served as the
foundation for the condition of September 11, in the articulation of
their apparatuses, have changed the manner in which wars are fought and
their images produced, distributed, and consumed.
15:00-18:00
Session 2: "Media of Memory: Narrating the Battle Front"
Presenter 1: Kinoshita Naoyuki (University of Tokyo)
The Memory of Yet Another "Previous War" within the "Previous War"
Presenter 2: Beatrice Fleury-Vilatte (University of Nancy)
French Television and the Memory of the Algerian War
Presenter 3: Jacques Walter (University of Metz)
Photographic Testimonies of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination
Camps: The Stakes of Current Debates
Presenter 4: Marita Sturken (USC)
Memories of Terror: American Memorializing in Oklahoma City and New York
Chair: Iwasaki Minoru (Tokyo University of Foreign Languages)
Outline
This session will shed light on what has never been easy to interpret:
the memory of war. The memory of hate and of pain that war has created
and has frozen, over the years begins to warp and become twisted and
repressed, turning into a blank or a scar seemingly impossible to put
into words, one that takes possession of people's temporality. Of the
three presentations, first Kinoshita Naoyuki of the University of Tokyo
will turn the clock back and clarify historically how memories of the
Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the wars that led off the
twentieth century, were shaped and applied. Then Beatrice Fleury-Villatte
of the University of Nice will argue how, in the case of the Algerian
War, the memory of the violence of colonialism and the war for liberation
were molded by later media. Finally, using these first two cases as a
background, Marita Sturken of the University of Southern California will
take up the problem of unearthing the mechanisms of collective memory in
media, especially in light of the circumstances after September 11.
Day Three: Wednesday, March 27, 2002
10:00-13:00
Session 3: "From Media Crisis to Counter Media"
Presenter 1: Yoneyama Lisa (University of California San Diego)
Americanization of Japanese Crimes Against Humanity at the End of
Post-Cold War
Presenter 2: Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Australia National University)
The Missle and the Mouse- Virtual Peace Movements in an Age of Terror
Presenter 3: Kitahara Megumi (Konan University)
War and the Imperial Family on Media
Chair: Yoshimi Shunya (University of Tokyo)
The discussions on the first two days of the symposium will have shown
how war has always been accompanied by and represented through media
during the twentieth century. In that era, media did not simply record
and cover war from without, but rather become a part of war, defining it,
representing it, and mediating its memory and various reenactments. In
this session, we will intersect the historical perspectives offered on
the previous day with a contemporary viewpoint and consider the problem
of the representation of war in today's media and forms of expression
through such issues as sexual violence and the comfort women, the
emperor's war responsibility, gender and imperialism/colonialism in
representations of war, terrorism and the globalization of media, the
crisis and possibility of the media, and media and the war of revenge
against Afghanistan.
15:00-18:00
Session 4: Summary Discussion: "Between War and Media"
Chairs: Iwasaki Minoru, Yoshimi Shunya
Panelists: Sebastian Conrad (Free University of Berlin)
Carol Gluck
Beatrice Fleury-Villatte
Tessa Morris Suzuki
Marita Sturken
Narita Ryuichi
Aaron Gerow
Kang Sang-jung (University of Tokyo)
Others
Outline
In this session we will offer a general debate about the issues raised
during the three days. First, Sebastian Conrad of the Free University of
Berlin will take up the task of organizing the points of argument
developed in each of the sessions. On the basis of that, the keynote
speaker and representatives from each of the first three sessions will
again attempt to develop and generalize these problems. Through this, we
hope to offer preliminary conclusions about issues such as: 1)
appropriately positioning the specifities of such media as propaganda,
cinema, memory, and memorials, in both Asian and Western contexts, amidst
the complex interelationship between the twentieth century as a media
century and as a century of war; 2) correctly positioning from a
post-Cold War perspective the Japanese army's invasion of Asia, the
comfort women issue, the Emperor Hirohito's war responsibility, as well
as other related problems involved in the narration of war within Asia
and under American control, from the Korean to the Vietnam War; 3)
accurately presenting, given a consciousness of circumstances after the
attacks of September 11, a critical perspective on what is the present
stage of the relationship between war and media and what kind of escape,
resistance, and opposition is possible.
Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171
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