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War in Pieces considers media representations of the first phase of the “War on Terror,” set between 2001 and 2013. The book argues that the central figures around which narratives of the conflicts cohered—the war journalist, the active-duty service member, the veteran, and the military family—served to mask the loss of the myth of a unified American national identity and embodied the negotiation of cultural anxieties. Offering a theory of narrative figuration that draws into conversation repetitions and differences across media forms (fiction and nonfiction films, television shows, and online videos), this book breaks down how these figures contributed to a continued sense of unified national identity even as different audiences came away with divergent understandings. This book frames these questions in terms of how US media packaged the “War on Terror” for future cultural memory even as the conflicts continued.

What do we see when we look at a battlefield? How do we come to understand environments as battlefields in the first place? What happens to our perception of war when we focus on the physical spaces of conflict? Warscapes is the first collection to pursue answers to such questions by considering the relationship between war, environment, and media along three lines: imagined geographies of control that prefigure environments as spaces of war; representations of resistance to occupation and ecocidal violence; and elemental reframings of archives and cultural memories of war. This book offers novel perspectives on historical conflict environments while also examining how hypothetical spaces of conflict are imagined. Deploying theoretical perspectives gleaned from film and media studies, ecocriticism, environmental history, urban studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies, among others, authors highlight an international spectrum of 21st-century fiction films and television series, documentaries, and video installations that challenge how we look at war.