“Every war is a war of words and images”: an interview about Gaza with W.J.T. Mitchell

Abstract W.J.T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry . He is an iconology and cultural studies expert, and his works include Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), Cloning Terror (2011) and the collection of influent essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005), awarded the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. This conversation with W.J.T. Mitchell focuses on the image media representation of the ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza to develop an approach to the visual particularities of this event. This interview aims to gain insight from cultural and visual studies about how conflict is represented and perceived in society, the media or contemporary culture. In light of his previous works Cloning Terror and “Eyeless in Gaza,” we explore and contrast the role and typology of the actual spreading of war images and how these can affect and even turn our perception of the events.