Past events
Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present
Book Release Celebration with W. J. T. Mitchell
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DATE: Monday, Nov.22
TIME:
6:00 PM
Please join the University of Chicago Press and the Jane Addams Hull–House Museum in celebrating the publication of W. J. T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present!
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and/or signing by the author.
The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche. and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, W. J. T. Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, Mitchell argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.
About W.J.T. Mitchell
W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His publications include: "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum, March 1992; "What Do Pictures Want?" October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative(1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).