Violent Cartographies

Violent Cartographies
Author: Michael J. Shapiro
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 1997
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081662920X

An innovative critique of the way historians and political scientists study war. How can we resist a nation-state vision of the globe? What is needed to "unmap" the familiar world? In Violent Cartographies, Michael J. Shapiro considers these questions, exploring the significance of war in contemporary society and its connections to the geographical imaginary. Employing an ethnographic perspective, Shapiro uses whiplash reversals and bizarre juxtapositions to jolt readers out of conventional thinking about international relations and security studies. Considering the ideas of thinkers ranging from yon Clausewitz to Virilio, from Derrida to DeLillo, Shapiro distances readers from familiar political and strategic accounts of war and its causes. Shapiro uses literary and film analyses to elucidate his themes. For example, he considers such cultural artifacts as U.S. Marine recruiting television commercials, American war movies, and General Schwarzkopf's autobiography, elaborating how a certain image of American masculinity is played out in the military imaginary and in the media. Other topics are Melville's The Confidence Man, Bunuel's film That Obscure Object of Desire, and a comparison of the U.S. invasion of Grenada to an Aztec "flower war". Throughout, Shapiro draws attention to the violence of the colonial encounters through which many modern nation-states were formed, and ultimately suggests possible directions for an ethics of minimal violence in the encounter with others. The overall effect is of a complex, cumulative, and layered analysis of the historical and moral conditions of the current use of violence in the conduct of international relations. A fascinating andchallenging work, Violent Cartographies will interest anyone concerned with the connections between war and culture.

Violent Cartographies

Violent Cartographies
Author: Michael J. Shapiro
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 260
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452902461

An innovative critique of the way historians and political scientists study war. How can we resist a nation-state vision of the globe? What is needed to "unmap" the familiar world? In Violent Cartographies, Michael J. Shapiro considers these questions, exploring the significance of war in contemporary society and its connections to the geographical imaginary. Employing an ethnographic perspective, Shapiro uses whiplash reversals and bizarre juxtapositions to jolt readers out of conventional thinking about international relations and security studies. Considering the ideas of thinkers ranging from yon Clausewitz to Virilio, from Derrida to DeLillo, Shapiro distances readers from familiar political and strategic accounts of war and its causes. Shapiro uses literary and film analyses to elucidate his themes. For example, he considers such cultural artifacts as U.S. Marine recruiting television commercials, American war movies, and General Schwarzkopf's autobiography, elaborating how a certain image of American masculinity is played out in the military imaginary and in the media. Other topics are Melville's The Confidence Man, Bunuel's film That Obscure Object of Desire, and a comparison of the U.S. invasion of Grenada to an Aztec "flower war". Throughout, Shapiro draws attention to the violence of the colonial encounters through which many modern nation-states were formed, and ultimately suggests possible directions for an ethics of minimal violence in the encounter with others. The overall effect is of a complex, cumulative, and layered analysis of the historical and moral conditions of the current use of violence in the conduct of international relations. A fascinating andchallenging work, Violent Cartographies will interest anyone concerned with the connections between war and culture.

The New Violent Cartography

The New Violent Cartography
Author: Samson Opondo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136345086

This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taken together, these essays present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts and genres of expressions to provoke the thinking that exceeds the conventional stories and practices of international relations. In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, the contributors to this volume treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below [besides and against] the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these essays disturb the functions, identities, and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds where they live, and the ways in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting in them. Contributions deploy feature films, literature, photography, architecture to think the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Bringing together a wide range of theorists from a host of geographical, cultural and theoretical contexts, this work explores the different ways in which an aesthetic treatment of world politics can contribute to an ethics of encounter predicated on minimal violence in encounters with people with different practices of identity. This work provides a significant contribution to the field of international theory, encouraging us to rethink politics and ethics in the world today.

Cinematic Geopolitics

Cinematic Geopolitics
Author: Michael J. Shapiro
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2008-10-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134002076

"The new violent cartographies -- Preemption up close : film and Pax Americana -- Fogs of war -- The sublime today : re-partitioning the global sensible -- Aesthetics of disintegration : allegiance and intimacy in the former "Eastern bloc"--Perpetual war?"

Politics of Visibility and Belonging

Politics of Visibility and Belonging
Author: Emil Edenborg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351712942

In this book, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community. The book examines what it is that determines which subjects and narratives become visible and which are occluded in public spheres; how they are seen and made intelligible; and how those processes are involved in the imagination of communities. Investigating the differentiated consequences of visibility, Edenborg discusses what forms of visibility make belonging possible and what forms of visibility may be related to exclusion or violence. The book maps and analyses the practices and mechanisms whereby a state seeks to produce and shape belonging through controlling what becomes visible in public, and how that which becomes visible is seen and understood. In addition, it examines what forms contestation can take and what its effects may be. Advancing theoretical understanding and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualize the role of visibility in the production and contestation of political communities, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality politics, borders, citizenship, nationalism, migration and ethnic relations.

Michael J. Shapiro

Michael J. Shapiro
Author: Terrell Carver
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2012-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113634053X

Michael J. Shapiro’s writings have been innovatory with respect to the phenomena he has taken to be political, and the concomitant array of methods that he has brilliantly mastered. This book draws from his vast output of articles, chapters and books to provide a thematic yet integrated account of his boundary-crossing innovations in political theory and masterly contributions to our understanding of methods in the social sciences. The editors have focused on work in three key areas: Discourse Shapiro was one of the first theorists to demonstrate convincingly, and in a manner that has had a long-standing impact on the field, that language is not epiphenomenal to politics. Indeed, he shows that language is constitutive of politics. From his frequently-cited article on metaphor from the early 1980s to recent work on discourse and globalization, Shapiro has shown that politics happens not only with and through the use of language, but within discourse as a material practice. Culture Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s (1963) famous work on ‘The Civic Culture’ established a long-held but ultimately counterproductive relationship between culture and politics, one in which culture is an independent variable that has effects on politics. Samuel Huntington’s (1998) (in)famous polemic, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, only pushes this relationship to its breaking point. Shapiro’s rich and numerous writings on culture provide a powerful and important antidote to this approach, as Shapiro consistently shows (across wide-ranging contexts) that politics is in culture and culture is in politics, and no politically salient approach to culture can afford to turn either term into a causal variable. Violence While violence is surely not a theme foreign to political studies, no one has done more or better work in contemporary political theory to bring violence into play as a central term of political thought and to expand our understanding of violence. By reconceptualizing and reinterpreting this term, Shapiro’s work has helped us to rethink the very boundaries between political theory and international relations as putatively separate subfields of political science. And it explains why both political theorists interested in International Relations and International Relations scholars concerned with a broader understanding of international politics must both start with Shapiro’s work as required reading.

Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars

Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars
Author: Heather Ashley Hayes
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-05-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137480998

This work examines violence in the age of the terror wars with an eye toward the technologies of governance that create, facilitate, and circulate that violence. In performing a rhetorical cartography that explores the rise of the US armed drone program as well as moments of resistive violence that occurred during the Arab Spring directed at generating a counter-hegemony by Muslim populations, the author argues that the problem of the global terror wars is best addressed by a rhetorical understanding of the ways that governments, as well as individual subjects, turn to violence as a response to, or product of, the post September 11th terror society. When political examinations of terrorism are facilitated through understandings of discourse, clearer maps emerge of how violence functions to offer mechanisms by which governing bodies, and their subjects, evaluate the success or failure of the “War on Terror.” This book will be of interest to public policymakers and informed general readers as well as students and scholars in the fields of rhetoric, political theory, critical geography, US foreign relations/policy, war and peace studies, and cultural studies.

The Civic Gospel

The Civic Gospel
Author: William M. Reynolds
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9087904835

This book is a result of the times in which we are living. These times demand a response. When the authors began to write this book, it was not popular to dissent against the Bush administration. In fact, dissent was and still is equated with terrorism. Now, it might seem that the tide is turning and maybe after the 2008 election some of this nightmare we have been experiencing will change.

Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art

Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art
Author: Claire Reddleman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-11-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351777939

In this book, Claire Reddleman introduces her theoretical innovation "cartographic abstraction" – a material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. Reddleman closely engages with selected artworks (by contemporary artists such as Joyce Kozloff, Layla Curtis, and Bill Fontana) and theories in each chapter. Reconfiguring the Foucauldian underpinning of critical cartography towards a materialist theory of abstraction, cartographic viewpoints are theorised as concrete abstractions. This research is positioned at the intersection of art theory, critical cartography and materialist philosophy.