Violence and War in Culture and the Media

9    The returns of war

Bodies, images and invented ritualin the war on terror

Michael S. Drake

Introduction

This chapter undertakes a comparative study of the public receptions of the war dead in the UK and the US, using documentation from the public sphere, to produce insights into current conditions of the politics of mourning in relation to the ineffectiveness of the anti-war movements and to remilitarisation processes in these national civic cultural contexts. Judith Butler's work on the ‘powers of mourning’ after 9/11 was intended to inform critical opposition to the Bush regime's response, but this paper counter-poses to her analysis, the politics of mourning outlined by Gillian Rose (1996). The strategy of the anti-war movement, reflected ...