Epilogue: Situating the Self

This book opened with an image of military actors, in camouflage, standing on a stage set before a borderless world map. The map served much the same function as the backdrops I described in the last chapter. From studio flats to graphics-rich PowerPoints to self-branding websites, these backgrounds define and legitimate the subject standing before it. I have been preoccupied in these pages with self-backdrop interactions because they illustrate, often in explicitly theatrical terms, how identity is constituted through camouflage, here broadly defined as the spatial processes through which we engage, and adapt to, our material surroundings. Further, I have tried to tease out how our positioning relative to our environment is not always ours to determine. While the borderless map may have been designed to situate the United States on the side of the ‘world,’ unifying it cartographically with existing and potential Allies, it was perceived by others as an image of the US’s blindness with respect to how it is globally situated, and more crucially, how that positioning affects its less powerful neighbors.