1 <CN>Chapter 2<CN> <CT>Black Hawk Down: Recasting U.S. Military History at Somali Expense<CT> <CA>Lidwien Kapteijns<CA> From: Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, edited by Nigel Eltringham. New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2013, pp. 38-71. The Hollywood film Black Hawk Down revisits the history of the U.S. military Operation Irene in Mogadishu, Somalia on 3 October 1993. 1 The battle that ensued consisted of sixteen hours of intense urban warfare, during which Somali fighters downed two Black Hawk combat helicopters, killed nineteen U.S. soldiers, and dragged some of their bodies through the streets of Mogadishu. The film was based on the 1999 book of the same title by Mark Bowden and a film script by Ken Nolan. It was shot in Morocco, directed by Ridley Scott and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, both veterans of the genre of the war film. Made in close collaboration with the U.S. military (Department of Defence) and released in December 2001, it injected its portrayal of an apparent U.S. military defeat in Somalia in 1993 (shortly after the end of the Cold War) into a moment at which the U.S. military had just sent its troops into Afghanistan, shortly after 11 September 2001. Black Hawk Down is therefore deeply embedded in the domestic and international politics and policy struggles of both periods (see Lawrence and McGarrahan 2008: 448). Black Hawk Down has given rise to a small body of analytically superb scholarship, whose only drawback is its limited knowledge base and understanding of Somalia history. Here, I will draw on the strengths of this scholarship, 2 but focus on how Black Hawk Down