Violence and the Limits of Representation

Violence and the Limits of Representation

Author: G. Matthews

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-05-30

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1137296909

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Violence and the Limits of Representation explores the representation of violence in literature, film, drama, music and art in order to demonstrate the ways in which the work done by researchers in the Arts and Humanities can offer fresh perspectives on current social and political issues.


Engaging Violence

Engaging Violence

Author: Ivana Maček

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-26

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1134621671

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This volume opens up new ground in the field of social representations research by focusing on contexts involving mass violence, rather than on relatively stable societies. Representations of violence are not only symbolic, but in the first place affective and bodily, especially when it comes to traumatic experiences. Exploring the responses of researchers, educators, students and practitioners to long-term engagement with this emotionally demanding material, the book considers how empathic knowledge can make working in this field more bearable and deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, war, and mass political violence. Bringing together international contributors from a range of disciplines including anthropology, clinical psychology, history, history of ideas, religious studies, social psychology, and sociology, the book explores how scholars, students, and professionals engaged with violence deal with the inevitable emotional stresses and vicarious trauma they experience. Each chapter draws on personal histories, and many suggest new theoretical and methodological concepts to investigate emotional reactions to this material. The insights gained through these reflections can function protectively, enabling those who work in this field to handle adverse situations more effectively, and can yield valuable knowledge about violence itself, allowing researchers, teachers, and professionals to better understand their materials and collocutors. Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory, and representation will be of key value to students, scholars, psychologists, humanitarian aid workers, UN personnel, policy makers, social workers, and others who are engaged, directly or indirectly, with mass political violence, war, or genocide.


Violence and Civility

Violence and Civility

Author: Étienne Balibar

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0231527187

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In Violence and Civility, Étienne Balibar boldly confronts the insidious causes of violence, racism, nationalism, and ethnic cleansing worldwide, as well as mass poverty and dispossession. Through a novel synthesis of theory and empirical studies of contemporary violence, the acclaimed thinker pushes past the limits of political philosophy to reconceive war, revolution, sovereignty, and class. Through the pathbreaking thought of Derrida, Balibar builds a topography of cruelty converted into extremism by ideology, juxtaposing its subjective forms (identity delusions, the desire for extermination, and the pursuit of vengeance) and its objective manifestations (capitalist exploitation and an institutional disregard for life). Engaging with Marx, Hegel, Hobbes, Clausewitz, Schmitt, and Luxemburg, Balibar introduces a new, productive understanding of politics as antiviolence and a fresh approach to achieving and sustaining civility. Rooted in the principles of transformation and empowerment, this theory brings hope to a world increasingly divided even as it draws closer together.


Unravelling Research

Unravelling Research

Author: Teresa Macías

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing

Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00Z

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 177363545X

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Unravelling Research is about the ethics and politics of knowledge production in the social sciences at a time when the academy is pressed to contend with the historical inequities associated with established research practices. Written by an impressive range of scholars whose work is shaped by their commitment to social justice, the chapters grapple with different methodologies, geographical locations and communities and cover a wide range of inquiry, including ethnography in Africa, archival research in South America and research with marginalized, racialized, poor, mad, homeless and Indigenous communities in Canada. Each chapter is written from the perspective of researchers who, due to their race, class, sexual/gender identity, ability and geographical location, labour at the margins of their disciplines. By using their own research projects as sites, contributors probe the ethicality of long-established and cutting-edge methodological frameworks to theorize the indivisible relationship between methodology, ethics and politics, elucidating key challenges and dilemmas confronting marginalized researchers and research subjects alike.


History and Its Limits

History and Its Limits

Author: Dominick LaCapra

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-02-23

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0801457688

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Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).


Visual Peace

Visual Peace

Author: Frank Möller

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1137020407

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This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.


Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South

Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South

Author: Claire Raymond

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-28

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1351872532

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Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship to the Southern Agrarian critics who championed her work. While the representations of violence found in Carrie Mae Weems's installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Morrison's Beloved, Dickinson’s poetry, O'Connor's 'A View of the Woods' and 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café, and Hurston's Mules and Men are diverse in terms of artistic presentation, all allude to or are set in the antebellum and Jim Crow South. In addition, all involve feminine characters whose subjectivity is shaped by the practice of seeing acts of violence inflicted where there can be no effective resistance. While not proposing an equivalence between representing violence in visual images and written text, Raymond does suggest that visual images of violence can be interpreted in context with written evocations of violent imagery. Invoking sadism in its ethical sense of violence enacted on a victim for whom self-defense and recourse of any kind are impossible, Raymond's study is ultimately an exploration of the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of feminine characters as witnesses to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.


Beyond Partition

Beyond Partition

Author: Deepti Misri

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0252096819

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Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism, and state violence have marred the Indian natio- state since its inception. These phenomena frequently intersect with prevailing forms of gendered violence complicated by caste, religion, regional identity, and class within communities. Deepti Misri shows how Partition began a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of ""India"" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. She moves beyond that formative national event, however, in order to examine other forms of gendered violence in the postcolonial life of the nation, including custodial rape, public stripping, deturbanning, and enforced disappearances. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against women and men, Misri establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what ""India"" means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and India.


The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare

Author: Robert Appelbaum

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1839981482

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Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.


The Violence of Representation (Routledge Revivals)

The Violence of Representation (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Nancy Armstrong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317744357

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First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence – that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.