Raritan on War

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places-Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war-the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother's hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan's wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.

Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook

"Jackson and Karen Lears have given us a compelling and relevant collection of writings revealing the human, geopolitical, and moral costs of America’s long engagement with perpetual global war. Raritan on War is a profoundly important intervention in its revelations of the human consequences-at home and abroad-of the bipartisan commitment to war making." - Katrina vanden Heuvel (editorial director and publisher, The Nation) "At a time when armed conflict is not just widespread, but rehabilitated and sanctified in the eyes of many, Raritan on War is an important reminder of its ruination, its viciousness, and maybe most important, of the artifice and forgetting that lead societies to justify its use." - Branko Marcetic (Jacobin) "Raritan on War gives us a collection of beautifully told, unforgettable portraits of war and its ills. Bringing to life the voices and imagery of victims who have suffered war’s devastating harms, as well as the insidious role played by defenders of war, this volume represents the legacy of Raritan at its literary and timeless best." - Karen Greenberg (author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump) "While spanning a wide range of wars and eras, this anthology also offers a sharp focus on the U.S. warfare state in the present day. Raritan on War powerfully challenges us to look anew at the unhinged militarism that permeates American society." - Norman Solomon (author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine)

JACKSON LEARS is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor in chief of Raritan Quarterly. He has written five books in American cultural history, the most recent of which is Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. His essays and reviews have appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Republic; they will be collected in Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians: The Off-Modern in American History.

KAREN PARKER LEARS is associate editor of Raritan Quarterly. From her art studio, Swansquarter, she works under the name M. Fortuna. She has had solo shows at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and at the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  She created illuminations for Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Her work can be viewed on the website swansquarter.com.

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