Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.
History was always written by the winners. Despite the fact that the history of the War on Terror is relatively new, Hollywood is quick to develop a visual history of the conflict. Hollywood’s excellent realism aesthetics were successful in justifying the goal and method of the “war on terror,” interrupting ongoing reality to influence and reconstruct public memory about what happened. This dissertation will use three awarded and influential case studies: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper to demonstrate the fragmentation of film representation, that the film only speaks for “us.” The dissertation aims to uncover the hidden political unawareness behind film representations, the manner in which those films provide limited versions of what happened, and how the films emphasise the self-subjectivity while objectifying the other.
ScreenTrack: Using a Visual History of a Computer Screen to Retrieve Documents and Web Pages
