Ph.d.-prøveforsvar ved Christine Strandmose Toft
Titel: “The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Wars or Occupations?”
“The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Wars or Occupations?” examines literary representations of the so-called wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The study takes its point of departure in a number of statements by fictional soldiers. In one way or another, they all claim that there is something phony about their war; some of them even assert that ‘this isn’t a real war’. By comparing the stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan war with older representations of war and discussing the soldiers’ everyday life I show that these statements should not be read as a testimony to the so-called changing character of war but as a response to the fact that the soldiers find themselves in a situation that can best be described as a form of occupation. The study draws on cultural memory studies and feminist scholars with a particular interest in the relation between emotion and politics. In addition, I employ Frantz Fanon’s description of the colonized world as a divided world and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to illustrate the ways in which war stories and occupation stories are different from one another.