Contesting Torture

Contesting Torture PDF Author: Rory Cox
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000725928
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This edited volume seeks to contest prevailing assumptions about torture and to consider why, despite its illegality, torture continues to be widely employed and misrepresented. The resurgence of torture and public justifications of it led to the central questions that this inter-disciplinary volume seeks to address: How is it possible for torture to be practiced when it is legally prohibited? What kinds of moves do agents make that render torture palatable? Why do so many ignore the evidence that torture is ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique? Who are the victims of torture? The various contributors in the book look to history, the practices of interrogators, artistic representations, documentary films, rendition policies, political campaigns, diplomatic discourses, international legal rules, refugee practices, and cultural representations of death and the body to illuminate how torture becomes permissible. Building from the personal to the communal, and from the practical to the conceptual, the volume reflects the multivalence of torture itself. This framework enables readers at all levels better appreciate how and why torture is open to so many interpretations and applications. This book will be of much interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, Ethics, and International Legal Studies.

Contesting Torture

Contesting Torture PDF Author: Rory Cox
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000725928
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited volume seeks to contest prevailing assumptions about torture and to consider why, despite its illegality, torture continues to be widely employed and misrepresented. The resurgence of torture and public justifications of it led to the central questions that this inter-disciplinary volume seeks to address: How is it possible for torture to be practiced when it is legally prohibited? What kinds of moves do agents make that render torture palatable? Why do so many ignore the evidence that torture is ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique? Who are the victims of torture? The various contributors in the book look to history, the practices of interrogators, artistic representations, documentary films, rendition policies, political campaigns, diplomatic discourses, international legal rules, refugee practices, and cultural representations of death and the body to illuminate how torture becomes permissible. Building from the personal to the communal, and from the practical to the conceptual, the volume reflects the multivalence of torture itself. This framework enables readers at all levels better appreciate how and why torture is open to so many interpretations and applications. This book will be of much interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, Ethics, and International Legal Studies.

Witnessing Torture

Witnessing Torture PDF Author: Alexandra S. Moore
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331974965X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book demonstrates a new, interdisciplinary approach to life writing about torture that situates torture firmly within its socio-political context, as opposed to extending the long line of representations written in the idiom of the proverbial dark chamber. By dismantling the rhetorical divide that typically separates survivors’ suffering from human rights workers’ expertise, contributors engage with the personal, professional, and institutional dimensions of torture and redress. Essays in this volume consider torture from diverse locations – the Philippines, Argentina, Sudan, and Guantánamo, among others. From across the globe, contributors witness both individual pain and institutional complicity; the challenges of building communities of healing across linguistic and national divides; and the role of the law, art, writing, and teaching in representing and responding to torture.

A Different Trek

A Different Trek PDF Author: David Kroening Seitz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496236580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek's tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek's previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different "Trek" is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9's allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.

Speaking about Torture

Speaking about Torture PDF Author: Julie A. Carlson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823242269
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
This collection of essays is the first book to take up the urgent issue of torture from the array of approaches offered by the arts and humanities. In the post-9/11 era, where we are once again compelled to entertain debates about the legality of torture, this volume speaks about the practice in an effort to challenge the surprisingly widespread acceptance of state-sanctioned torture among Americans, including academics and the media–entertainment complex. Speaking about Torture also claims that the concepts and techniques practiced in the humanities have a special contribution to make to this debate, going beyond what is usually deemed a matter of policy for experts in government and the social sciences. It contends that the way one speaks about torture—including that one speaks about it—is key to comprehending, legislating, and eradicating torture. That is, we cannot discuss torture without taking into account the assaults on truth, memory, subjectivity, and language that the humanities theorize and that the experience of torture perpetuates. Such accounts are crucial to framing the silencing and demonizing that accompany the practice and representation of torture. Written by scholars in literary analysis, philosophy, history, film and media studies, musicology, and art history working in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, the essays in this volume speak from a conviction that torture does not work to elicit truth, secure justice, or maintain security. They engage in various ways with the limits that torture imposes on language, on subjects and community, and on governmental officials, while also confronting the complicity of artists and humanists in torture through their silence, forms of silencing, and classic means of representation. Acknowledging this history is central to the volume’s advocacy of speaking about torture through the forms of witness offered and summoned by the humanities.

Xenograffiti

Xenograffiti PDF Author: R. Reginald
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 0809519003
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
In this new retrospective collection spanning almost forty years, Pilgrim Award- and Collector's Award-winning fantasy novelist, critic, and bibliographer Robert Reginald contributes forty-five essays on writers of fantastic literature, including such major and minor figures as: Piers Anthony, Edwin Lester Arnold, Margaret Atwood, John Kendrick Bangs, Leslie Barringer, John Bellairs, Arthur Byron Cover, Lindsey Davis, Alexander de Comeau, Daphne du Maurier, R. Lionel Fanthorpe, H. Rider Haggard, Charlotte Haldane, Edward Heron-Allen, Eleanor M. Ingram, Vernon Knowles, Katherine Kurtz, Andrew Lang, Fritz Leiber, Bruce McAllister, Ward Moore, Robert Nathan, Sir Henry Newbolt, William F. Nolan, John Norman, Keith Roberts, Michael Reaves, Brian Stableford, and George Zebrowski. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography and history of the publications of Starmont House, Inc., and FAX Collector's Editions, a selection of reviews and obituaries, a bibliography, and detailed index. This unique literary collection will prove of interest both to students and researchers alike. This second edition features fifteen new pieces, including the author's earliest published critique (1968), and a number of original autobiographical reflections on his life and career penned shortly after his heart attack in 2003.

101 Ways to Torture Your Husband

101 Ways to Torture Your Husband PDF Author: Maria Garcia-Kalb
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 144051285X
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
He forgot your birthday. He always leaves his socks on the floor. He’s glued to the tube all weekend for every game. Let’s face it: Even the best of husbands are a real pain in the ass sometimes. And when all the “talks,” counseling sessions and self-help books fail, there’s only one viable recourse: torture. In this hilarious collection of clever tricks and tactics, you will learn how to put your husband in his place when you: Bury the remote in the backyard Have lunch with an ex Pick a fight during the game Book a male masseuse for your next massage Delete his DVR recordings And many more! Risk factors rank damage done as well as how long it’ll take him to get over it. With the creatively wicked methods outlined in this manual, he’ll never misbehave again!

The Lives of Literature

The Lives of Literature PDF Author: Arnold Weinstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691254796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person—and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge—and come to understand its cost. In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

The Marriage Game

The Marriage Game PDF Author: Fern Michaels
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668004755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A group of diverse women—brought together by their connection with the same dishonest man—bond under the most unlikely of circumstances and find romance along the way in this action-packed celebration of friendship and love from New York Times bestselling author Fern Michaels. When Samantha Rainford—new wife to Douglas Cosmo Rainford III—returns home from her honeymoon to find divorce papers waiting, she’s shocked and heartbroken. Then she discovers that she’s not the first to be abandoned—she’s one of four (or maybe more) ex-Mrs. Rainfords—and decides it’s time to put into practice that old truism: Don’t get mad, get even. With her knowledge from FBI training—which she may have flunked out of, but she remembers a thing or two—Sam gathers the other ex-Mrs. Rainfords to help her enact her revenge. Together, the motley crew attends a top-secret private special-ops training camp in the North Carolina mountains, where Sam meets fiercely disciplined ex-CIA operative Kollar Havapopulas. Tall and as handsome as a Greek god, “Pappy” is the best at what he does—transforming civilians into highly skilled fighting teams. What he’s less adept at, however, is telling a woman how he feels, and before long he discovers he’s developing some very intense feelings for Samantha Rainford—an attraction that seems fated to be a total disaster. Two personalities as strong as Sam and Pappy are sure to strike sparks, but will the fire that burns between them consume everything in its path?

Tortured

Tortured PDF Author: Justine Sharrock
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 047059313X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
An eye-opening exposé of America's torture regime Myths about torture abound: Waterboarding is the worst we've done. The soldiers were hardened professionals. All Americans now believe that what we did was wrong. Torture is now a thing of the past. Journalist Justine Sharrock's reporting reveals a huge chasm between what has made headlines and what has actually happened. She traveled around the country, talking to the young, low-ranking soldiers that watched our prisoners, documenting what it feels like to torture someone and discovering how many residents of small town America think we should have done a lot more torture. Tortured goes behind the scenes of America's torture program through the personal stories of four American soldiers who were on the frontlines of the "war on terror," including the Abu Ghraib whistleblower. They reveal how their orders came from the top with assurances that those orders were legal and how their experiences left them emotionally scarred and suffering a profound sense of betrayal by the very government for which they fought. Based on the firsthand accounts of young, working-class soldiers who were forced to carry out orders crafted by officers, politicians, and government lawyers who have never answered for their actions The Department of Justice may still launch an investigation into torture under Bush—and Sharrock argues it must be done Describes how it feels to torture, and how people back home reacted to the soldiers' revelations If reading Tortured doesn't make you angry, nothing America does to tarnish its reputation as a beacon of fairness and freedom ever will.

Popular Culture and the Political Values of Neoliberalism

Popular Culture and the Political Values of Neoliberalism PDF Author: George A. Gonzalez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498591868
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Reality is made up of the Absolute and Causality. The absolute (most saliently philosophized about by Georg Hegel) is where normative values inhere. Causality can be described as the measurable effects of the normative values of the absolute and the laws of physics (also ostensibly a product of the absolute). Humans are special insofar as they access the higher aspects of the Absolute – altruism, compassion, love, humor, science, engineering, etc. The Absolute also contains what can be considered the less attractive values or impulses: greed, lust for power, hate, self-centeredness, conceit, etc. Predicating society on what I deem the lower (spirits) aspects of the absolute (most prominently, greed) results in personal, social dysfunction and ultimately the end of civilization. Conversely, a society based on justice is stable and vibrant. Justice is a classless society, free of gender and ethnic biases. My argument is based on popular culture – especially the Star Trek franchise. One implication of my thesis is that capitalist values generate psychological neurosis and societal instability – even catastrophe. Additionally, the political values that dominate the current neoliberalist world system (and especially the American government) are the other, the will to power – resulting in war, and global political instability. Popular culture is germane to philosophy and contemporary politics because television/movie creators frequently try to attract viewers by conveying authentic philosophical and political motifs. Conversely, viewers seek out authentic movies and television shows. This is in contrast to opinion surveys (for instance), as the formation of the data begins with the surveyor seeking to directly solicit an opinion – however impromptu or shallow