Presentation on 'American Sniper' at Winona State

On Wednesday, October 28th J. Paul Johnson will present "Screening American Sniper on the 21st-Century College Campus" at 7pm in Stark Hall room 103 at Winona State University. The event is part of the university's CLASP series.

Early in 2015, numerous scheduled college campus screenings of Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed war biopic American Sniper were protested, and of those, some cancelled, as Muslim and other student groups protested the film’s representation of Iraqi soldiers and citizens as “savages.” This presentation will chart the controversy over campus screenings of American Sniper, locate them in a historical context, and advocate for those who have been misrepresented by its depiction of non-Americans as “savages.”

J. Paul Johnson is Professor of English and Film Studies at Winona State, where he also serves as chairperson of the Mass Communication Department. He has published books and articles on composition and rhetoric and presented at national and international conferences on film and literature. His current research focuses on the intersections of genre identification, reception, and representation in film studies.

Here is a discussion about the film from The Young Turks: