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Undead examines the visual culture of war, broadly understood, through the lens of animation. Focusing on works in which relational, intermedial, and variably paced practices of “(inter)(in)animation” generate aesthetic tactics for thinking about, feeling, and reframing war, Karen Redrobe analyzes works by artists including Yael Bartana, Nancy Davenport, Kelly Dolak and Wazhmah Osman, Gesiye, David Hartt, Helen Hill, Onyeka Igwe, Maryam Mohajer, Ibrahim Nasrallah, and Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Deftly moving between cinema and media studies, peace and conflict studies, and art history, Undead is an interdisciplinary feminist meditation on the complex relationship between states of war and the discourses, infrastructures, and institutions through which memory, change, and understanding are made.
Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis.
"Brilliant and deeply inspiring, this book asks its readers to rethink war and animation together, producing a global, decolonial, and feminist theory of the animated image. Weaving a tapestry of animated works and theoretical engagements, Undead invites us to see a different, more hopeful world: one of un-war."—Marc Steinberg, author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan
"With theoretical brilliance and an encyclopedic knowledge of film and cultural history, Karen Redrobe explores how animated figures, including cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Wile E. Coyote, have been deployed in film, video, and art to counter dominant visual representations of war and violence that dehumanize the suffering of others. Undead enriches the feminist discourse of war resistance, which grows increasingly urgent in our times of emboldened cruelty and destructiveness."—Rosalyn Deutsche, author of Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery
"Why have filmmakers and artists turned to animation as a medium through which to reflect on experiences of war throughout the long twentieth century? Karen Redrobe relates the unique properties and unruly temporalities of the animated image with its effectiveness for feminist, decolonial, and anti-fascist projects of ‘undoing war' as a cultural and epistemological framework as much as an event. Undead boldly and brilliantly intervenes in the theory and history of the art of animation, charting new approaches to the politics of the moving image at a moment when these are more urgently needed than ever."—Jean Ma, author of At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators
252 pp.6 x 9Illus: 32 color figures, 10 b/w figures, 7 videos
9780520386266$34.95|£30.00Paper
Apr 2025