Violent Belongings

Violent Belongings
Author: Kavita Daiya
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 159213744X

Violent Belongings examines transnational South Asian culture from 1947 onwards in order to offer a new, historical account of how gender and ethnicity came to determine who belonged, and how, in the postcolonial Indian nation.

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
Author: Charles E Cobb Jr.
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465080952

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection -- yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing -- and, when necessary, using -- firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement's success. Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

Figurations of Violence and Belonging

Figurations of Violence and Belonging
Author: Adi Kuntsman
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783039115648

This book offers a critical analysis of the complex relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways sexual, ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against, violence. Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine and in cyberspace, it gives an insight into the world of hate speech and fantasies of torture and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of ghostly hauntings from the past and anxieties about the present and future. The author raises questions about the responsibilities of national homemaking, the complicity of queerness within violent regimes of colonialism and war, and the ambivalence of immigrant belonging at the intersection of marginality and privilege. Drawing from scholarship on migration, diaspora and race studies, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and studies on cyberculture, the book traces the interplay between the different forms of violence - physical and verbal, social and psychic, material and discursive - and offers novel insights into the analysis of nationalism, on-line sociality and queer migranthood.

Culture and Redemption

Culture and Redemption
Author: Tracy Fessenden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2011-06-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400837308

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

Beautiful, Violent Things

Beautiful, Violent Things
Author: Madeline Anthes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736947746

"Drunk ghosts, feral mothers...riveting obsessions and unbelongings and captivities-the fragmented texts in Beautiful, Violent Things seethe and grip and fluoresce without apology. In these eleven dispatches, Madeline Anthes carefully weaves desire and estrangement, reimagines power as a woman's capacity for hollowing a man, the ability to deliver impossibilities from her misappropriated body. The speakers in this collection compose a primal song, reprise-with blood and feathers and new ferocity-the iconoclastic feminisms of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Anthes is alive on the page, a writer to watch." - Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of Blood Histories "I know these stories by Madeline Anthes. You know them too. They are the stories we whisper to each other: Mother to daughter, sister to sister, friend to friend. They are the stories about the things we want, the things we need, the things that have broken us, the things that have tried to break us. Listen closely to the voices in these stories -- you will find someone you know in them. You might even find yourself. This is a powerful debut collection from a gifted writer. We are lucky to have it." - Cathy Ulrich, author, Ghosts of You "The narrators in Beautiful, Violent Things want powerfully. They want to be seen, want to be left alone, want to hold their baby, want to want to hold their baby-but more than anything, they want you to listen to their voices. To the way the words sound coming from their mouths in a cold and specific arrangement. I am Wendy, chrome sleek and velvet fast: breathing heat and running wild. They want you to hear what lies just behind their words: the impossible problem of desire. A problem Anthes has studied like a scholar. Let's listen to what she's found-all these alluring, dangerous voices calling out." - Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum "The stories in Beautiful, Violent Things are alive, visceral and raw, not just in the blunt emotional honesty of their narrators-women who know what they want, who feel the twisted pull of the lives they have and the ones they've given up to be mothers and lovers-but in the prose, so very warm with poetry and song. Anthes is a writer who understands how to make the quiet moments in life roar." - Christopher Gonzalez, author of I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat

Inscrutable Belongings

Inscrutable Belongings
Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503605930

Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.

War Beyond the Battlefield

War Beyond the Battlefield
Author: David Grondin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135711399

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Haunted Objects

Haunted Objects
Author: Megan Corbin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469664305

Examining testimonial production in Southern Cone Latin America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), Haunted Objects analyzes how the changed relationship between the subject and the material world influenced the way survivors narrate the stories of their detentions in the wake of the political violence of the 1970s and 80s. It explores descriptions of objects within testimonial narratives and uses these descriptions to inform an analysis of how the objects that survived the violence--items recovered by archeologists from former detention centers, the personal belongings of disappeared peoples, the prison craftwork created by political prisoners during their detention, and the bodies of the second generation children of the disappeared, all join together in memory projects in the post-dictatorship to offer "spectral testimony" about the past.