Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness

Abstract

As the mood of the West turned retrospective and millennial in the final years of the 20th century, it became clear that the images by which western societies were defining the meaning of this stretch of history had shifted their form and emphasis — from pictures of division and conflict for the first threequarters of the century to those of interconnectedness at its end. War and destruction dominate the frames through which we look at the most of the past hundred years: the disjointed march of troops from nowhere to nowhere on the battlefields of the Great War, the emaciated bodies and charred cities of the second and wider World War, the eruptions of American firepower in the fields and villages of Vietnam, and the mass evacuations that presaged the killing fields of Cambodia. These images have not faded from our collective consciousness. Rather, they have gained secondary and tertiary currency through the commemorative efforts of contemporary historians, novelists, filmmakers, and museologists, all intent, it seems, on finding at this emotionally charged calendrical moment the appropriate visual languages to memorialize the century’s vast conflicts. 1 One need think only of the controversies surrounding the US. Vietnam memorial and their resolution through Maya Lin’s inspired and reflective roll-call of names, the attack against perceived revisionism in the Enola Gay exhibit at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum (Harwit 1996), Stephen Spielberg’s embrace of black-and-white cinematography in his

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 117 citations exist upstream.