"If one comes to understand war entirely through the soldier or veterans own experience and narrative of it, it is a very particular understanding of war," she says. "The violence as a soldier encounters is not just negative, right? It's also sort of sublime ... The soldier might be traumatized, but he's heroic."
Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. How the civil-military divide makes troops into super citizens and what it means that agents of state violence are turning to the grammar of identity politics—and more. The second in a two-part interview.
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