Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet

Description

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they endeavor to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can bring about change in the real world.

Leshu Torchin is lecturer in film studies at the University of St. Andrews.

"Stunning, urgent, forceful, and necessary, "Creating the Witness" exorcises the ghostly and ghastly representations of genocide and pushes them beyond the graveyards and the archives of trauma. This magnificent, grounded, and rigorously researched book boldly probes a century of imaging genocides in Armenia, Germany, Rwanda, the Balkans, the Philippines, the United States, and Darfur across photography, documentary, popular culture narrative films, user-generated media, and gaming. Leshu Torchin guts how we see and think about genocide: no longer spectres or spectacles, those images of the dead from across the globe animate dynamic ethical engagements, converting horrified reactions into collective action." --Patricia R. Zimmermann, author of "States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies"