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

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?

Recoil here references turning away with an emotional intensity suggestive of the backward force that can occur when firing a gun. Denial, for instance, is an emotional reaction that distances the viewer from the violence.

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.

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.

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.

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

ambitions. Photojournalism furthers these ambitions to the extent that this cultural practice produces an ethnocentric gaze at social violence occurring “elsewhere.” Atrocity images often privilege a normative gaze that can be intentionally moralistic because they call for a judgment by the viewer

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