War

The concept of the evils of war weaves through Johnson’s work like a connective thread that at times appears visibly on the surface and at other times more subtly underlies the fabric of his thinking and expression. If the idea of war is pervasive, however, the actual body of the warrior is rare. Johnson avoided representation of the embattled flesh and bone of those who did the fighting and suffered its consequences. This dichotomy—confront the idea of war but avoid war-torn bodies—is central to recognizing the effect in his work of postmemory, the phenomenon through which trauma can be displaced onto later generations and can be reimagined by those who are distanced from immediate disaster by history or geography. This chapter analyzes the ways in which Johnson’s transformative abstractions of the corporeal human form are situated within narratives of human-generated violence whose pains resist direct confrontation.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Phenomenon · Political science · Representation (politics) · Situated · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Transformative learning · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Philosophy · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact