Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Critical American Studies)

I suggest we consider historical witnessing as an act of imagining subjectivity, for conjuring subjectivities in the photographic archive can expose the costs of citizenship for both men.

For Donald, did this archive remind him of the Japanese soldier as a vicious enemy, thus helping to keep alive the racism central to nationalist justifications for war? Or did the photographs of family members and soldier buddies that look remarkably like Donald’s own pictures function as aide-memoires of the Japanese soldier’s humanity? Did Donald

Just as acknowledgment of atrocities committed by American troops is a critical methodological tool to disrupt U.S. triumphalist histories, recognition of this colonial history unsettles Japanese nationalist attachments to a narrative of victimization.

If shame sullied Donald’s own memories of his military service, then what was his “compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire” to return to a moment of origin signified in the acquisition of these souvenirs?

they identify the archive as a site of struggle and contestation not only over control of history and social memory but also over subjectivity and community formation.

If the archive is both an institutional and a discursive site of control, Derrida argues, then technologies of archivization are fundamental to the production of legible and hence authoritative historical narratives

Foucault (1972, 129) rejects assumptions that the archive provides direct and unmediated access to history. Instead, he conceptualizes the archive as a system, or the “rules of practice,” which legitimizes, limits, and directs what can and cannot be said. In other words, he argues, “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that

Visual culture studies in this period moved from understanding archives as repositories of documentary evidence to conceptualizing them as productive institutional sites of visual knowledge. This post-structuralist turn has led to innovative methodological inquiries into how archives elicit myriad negotiations around subjectivity, citizenship, and

Naming a group of objects an archive certainly functions as a form of boundary making that elides the multiple purposes that material objects have, purposes that often change over time.