Perspectives on War: The Front

VOLUME 5     NUMBER 1     JAUNUARY 2008

Introduction: Notes on the Front

While InterCulture's editorial board wanted to devote an issue towards clarifying the borders of war, specifically in relation to the concept of the front, many of the essays we received did something else. Marc Lafleur in “"The Bomb and the Bombshell: The Body as Virtual Battlefront"” points out that once the question of permanent war enters into culture, there exists an urgent need to define the limits of that permanence in order to preserve some form of resistance (29). The goal of clarifying what constitutes the front of war results from the increasing realization that the battlefront is everywhere. Given this context, a more prescient objective would be to attempt to locate the politics within (borrowing from David Harvey's terminology) the uneven spatial, social, and cultural development of permanent warfare. The concept of the front provides a means through which this exploration may occur. Together, the following essays create a working vocabulary that begins to explore the emergence of the front from historical, sociological, philosophical, political, anthropological and literary perspectives.

See It Now, the Atomic Drug Store and Las Vegas: At Home in the Cold War                   7
  Dinah Zeiger

Playing War                                                                                                                              16
  Ken MacLeish

The Bomb and the Bombshell: The Body as Virtual Battlefront                                         23
  Marc Lafleur

Conceptualizing the Embodied Front:  An Analysis of Born on the Fourth of July           33
  Christina Weber

Narratives: The Front Line of Identity Politics                                                                      43
  Christian Noll

Perceptions of the Front By Serbian Civilians During the First World War,                     53
1914 –- 1918
  Bogdan Trifunović