Iraq war body counts: reportage, photography, and fiction

This essay explores the representation of the Iraq War dead. There is, as yet, no official count of those killed in Iraq. US military policy established a moratorium on representing the American dead, meaning that any images became contested. This essay examines the debates around this fraught question as it emerges in newspaper reportage, photography, confrontational art, and the fiction of the war. It ends with an exploration of fiction by non-American writers Sinan Antoon, Saad Hossain, and Ahmed Saadawi, in whose work there appears an attempt to reinscribe the absent bodies of the Iraq War

'Why have the dead come back? The instance of photography

This essay examines how the critical theory of photography has, at least since Barthes and Sontag, developed a default position that is routinely suspicious of the political and aesthetic value of images of the dead, even as the archive of images of the dead continues to accumulate and to shock. Photographic theory seems to share the post-war assumptions that death has been eclipsed by modernity, sequestered away and rendered taboo. The project here is to give a sense of the array of photographic practice that exists in stark opposition to these assumptions, and indeed in the contemporary moment seems actively to stage an argument with the thesis of the 'eclipse of death'. It considers work ranging from Sally Mann and Luc Delahaye to the recent projects of Edgar Martins

The weird: a dis/orientation

This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in ‘weird fiction’ from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes that the very slipperiness of the genre insidiously undermines any fixity of definition, constantly shifting boundaries and defying the act of ever being fully ‘introduced’. An orientation in this emergent field is also about acknowledging disorientation