Political Violence and the Imagination

Political Violence and the Imagination PDF Author: Mathias Thaler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000090639
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Political Violence and the Imagination

Political Violence and the Imagination PDF Author: Mathias Thaler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000090639
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Complicity

Complicity PDF Author: Iain Banks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743200187
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In Scotland, a self-appointed executioner dispenses justice to fit the crime. Thus the lenient judge who let a rapist go is punished by being raped, while a man who killed is killed in turn. By the author of The Wasp Factory.

Complicity

Complicity PDF Author: Christopher Kutz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521039703
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic, and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of contemporary moral theory.

The Orphaned Imagination

The Orphaned Imagination PDF Author: Guinn Batten
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Studies of the English Romantic poets generally portray them either as transcending the workings of capitalism or as working in complicity with an entrepreneurial economy. In The Orphaned Imagination, Guinn Batten challenges standard accounts of Romantic poetry and argues that Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge--each of whom suffered the loss of a father or father-figure at an early age--possessed an orphan's special insight into the dynamics and aesthetics of commodity culture and its symptomatic melancholia. Building on the theoretical insights of Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Batten interweaves the discourses of psychoanalysis, economics, biography, sexuality, melancholy, value, and exchange to question accepted ideas of how Romantic poetry works. She asserts that poetic labor is in fact paradigmatic of the kinds of production--and the kinds of desire--that capitalist culture renders invisible. If symbolic exchange, in cash or in words, requires the surrender of a beloved object, if healthy mourning requires an orphan to "work through" emotional loss through the consolation of art or a love for the living, then the rebellious Romantic poet, Batten contends, possessed unique insight into the alternative authority of a poetic language that renounced a culture of denial. Batten urges that scholars move beyond critical approaches condemning allegedly regressive forms of pleasure, recognizing that they, too, are haunted by melancholic attachments to dead poets as they conduct their work. The Orphaned Imagination will interest anyone concerned with the claims of the English Romantic poets to a distinctive, valuable form of knowledge and those who may wonder about the power of contemporary theory to illuminate a traditional field.

The End of Imagination

The End of Imagination PDF Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 160846654X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Five books of essays in one volume from the Booker Prize–winner and “one of the most ambitious and divisive political essayists of her generation” (The Washington Post). With a new introduction by Arundhati Roy, this new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living—published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things—in which she forcefully condemned India’s nuclear tests and its construction of enormous dam projects that continue to displace countless people from their homes and communities. The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally. Praise for Arundhati Roy “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace Award “Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays.” —Howard Zinn, author of Political Awakenings and Indispensable Zinn “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.” —Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “One of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and The Battle For Paradise “Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects “India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence.” —The New York Times

Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams PDF Author: Johanna Drucker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226165051
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Surveying a wide range of exciting and innovative artists, Drucker demonstrates their clear departure from the past, petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well.

Southbound

Southbound PDF Author: Anjali Enjeti
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820360074
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult. The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media’s role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity’s marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.

Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination

Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination PDF Author: Silke Stroh
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810134047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.” Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands, which also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. Silke Stroh shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism.

The Age of Minerva, Volume 2

The Age of Minerva, Volume 2 PDF Author: Paul Ilie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512803332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Herman Melville in Context

Herman Melville in Context PDF Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316766969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Herman Melville in Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of Herman Melville, a towering figure in nineteenth-century American and world literature. The book grounds the study of Herman Melville's writings to the world that influenced their composition, publication and recognition, making it a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, students and general readers. Bringing together contributions covering a wide range of topics, the collection of essays covers the geographical, social, cultural and literary contexts of Melville's life and works, as well as its literary reception. Herman Melville in Context will enable readers to approach Melville's writings with fuller insight, and to read and understand them in a way that approximates the way they were read and understood in his time.