CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY IRAQI STUDIES

Industrial scale torture.  Systematic, massive killings and displacement.
Skyrocketing poverty, childhood malnutrition, birth defects.  Scarcity of
power, sanitation, food and water.  Having sustained nearly two decades of
U.S.-led war, sanctions, and occupation, life in Iraq has become unbearably
miserable and desperate.  Yet while official U.S. advocacy for "never-ending
war" in Iraq and its Middle Eastern environs has only intermittently
wavered, popular U.S. support for the prospect has drastically waned.
Indeed the U.S. government and its allies face an unprecedented legitimation
crisis over their decades-long military rampage throughout Middle Eastern
regions considered key to Western control and dominance of global labor and
resources.

Corporate and mainstream media and film have been instrumental in attempting
to contain this crisis by propagating rationales and justifications for the
ongoing war and occupation.  As S. K. Gupta writes in the November 2007
issue of Z Magazine, for instance, continued U.S. perpetration of a
"never-ending war" that is largely responsible for a "hellish existence for
Iraqi civilians" would be impossible "unless a majority of the public
believed G.I.s are there to protect Iraqis" (24).  Sadly, this and similar
rationales are prevalent and widespread, and where they are not, public
expressions of protest and critique are subject to increasingly
sophisticated techniques of suppression and surveillance aimed at stifling
principled dissent and fragmenting organized resistance to the war.

Contributions are sought for a special issue of the International Journal of
Contemporary Iraqi Studies that will address critically the role and
function of media and film, both Western and Arab, in legitimizing--as well
as possibly averting--continued U.S.-led war and occupation in Iraq and
beyond.  Papers might elucidate the corporate media institutions, strategies
and tactics through which ideological and discursive rationales for
perpetual war are produced and disseminated for film and media audiences
internationally.  They might explicate how moving-image technologies
instrumental to such ends are concomitantly instrumental to the development
and implementation of surveillance and torture in both Euro/America and
Iraq.  They might consider how Iraqis are represented in these instances,
and how their aesthetic constructions are inscribed both literally and
figuratively, through and across the institutional structures and
cinematic/televisual practices facilitating and enacting today's veritable
Western crusade.  They might speculate upon the significance of such
inscriptions to the relative failure or success of particular social systems
engaged historically in travestying world peace and justice.  And they might
explore the various alternative representations and modalities that have
emerged against the war from the political margins via digital media and the
Internet.

Please e-mail papers, not to exceed 30 pages, by June 30, 2008 to:

Terri Ginsberg <[log in to unmask]>
Film Studies Program
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
AND
Tareq Ismael <[log in to unmask]>
Department of Political Science
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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