UC Santa Cruz

Although currently still engaged in the longest war in U.S. history, the military is comprised of only 1% of the U.S. population. In the absence of conscription, most Americans are isolated from the experience of combat and limited in their affective connections to war. Despite these limited geographic, psychological, cultural, aesthetic, and affective connections, the costs of war are coming home. Since 2001, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died; 50,000 were visibly wounded; and more than 500,000 suffer from invisible injuries such as PTSD. These human losses only begin to index the effects of the wars on returning servicemembers, their families, and the larger civilian population, as rising rates of military suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcohol and substance abuse, and homicide point to a larger crisis in which the homefront and battlefront are increasingly merged.

In this dissertation, I analyze how contemporary war novels, cinema, and post-cinematic media try to bridge the "military-civilian divide" through the affective conditions of war. My central claim is that the traces of war can be found not only in the content but also in the form of texts such as Toni Morrison's Home (2012), Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem (2011), and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. I argue that these hybrid forms, which transgress boundaries of fact and fiction, generate war's multiple affects within the fictional textual world and in the real audiences who read or watch them. These texts help to bridge combat experience and civilian ignorance by appealing to affective states both in the characters and the audience. To better understand the effects of modern war's changing spaces, times, tactics, strategy, and weapons, I analyze texts that represent both the battlefront and the homefront. By bringing together different scales of representation and affective resonance, we can see the war stories that are often neglected and better understand how to engage with and heal a new generation of war wounded.