Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992-95 War

(Paperback)

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The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts to have erupted since the end of the Second World War. But although the war occurred in 'Europe's backyard' and received significant media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to cultural representations of the conflict. Stephen Harper analyses how the war has been depicted in global cinema and television over the past quarter of a century. Focusing on the representation of some of the war's major themes, including humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide, rape and ethnic cleansing, Harper explores the role of popular media culture in reflecting, reinforcing -- and sometimes contesting -- nationalist ideologies.

Reviews

Harper offers a persuasive and powerful account of the representations of the Bosnian war that tells a wider story about oversimplifications of historical reality in cinematic productions and reveals how strongly geopolitical ideologies can underpin popular culture. * European Journal of Communication *
Very well written, engaged and easily readable, this books offers and excellent combination of textual and visual analysis of the Bosnian war movies with general cultural and film theory on the one hand, and on the other hand shows links between media and cinematic production with dominant discourses in international relations and foreign affairs of major geopolitical powers. Relating media representations and geo-politics has been more prominent in scholarship since the 9/11, but applying it so thoroughly and knowledgeably - to the cinematic production about Bosnian war is a welcome novelty. * Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Professor, International Institute of Social Studies/EUR, The Netherlands *
Screening Bosnia presents a trenchant analysis of how films and TV dramas have reproduced and endorsed a tendentious ideological version of the Bosnian war. Stephen Harper ably skewers the historical inaccuracies and Balkanist stereotyping employed by liberal filmmakers promoting liberal interventionist fantasies. Not only is this book a brilliant work of film criticism, it also challenges common-sense orthodoxies about past conflicts and current geopolitics. * Philip Hammond, Professor of Media & Communications, London South Bank University, UK *
Stephen Harpers study is a splendid, and long-overdue, survey of films and TV productions made in the aftermath of the Bosnian War of the early-mid 1990s. Appearing some quarter of a century after the war, his book offers a timely and nuanced understanding of this small but brutal conflict and the ways in which it has been represented and distorted on the screen. Harper provides the reader with a dispassionate account of the causes and events of the war itself, then meticulously investigates cinematic representations of the conflict produced by many of the parties involved, whether as combatants or peacekeepers. With close readings of a wide range of productions from Hollywood, Pakistan, the UK, and each of the ethnic groupings who participated in the war, Screening Bosnia examines the mediatized portrayal of ethnicity and nationalism, humanitarian interventionism and the dilemmas of peacekeeping, debates surrounding the oftentimes distorted representations of perpetrators and victims, and even the depiction of rape in war. I would warmly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in film and media studies, war studies or European political discourse in the late-twentieth century. * Ian Roberts, Senior Teaching Fellow Department of German, University of Warwick, UK *

Author Bio

Stephen Harper is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His previous books include Madness, Power and the Media (2009) and Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (2012).